Edna Nixon

Edna Nixon describes how Mary Wollstonecraft became a passionate believer in the education of her own sex, having herself suffered intensely as a woman.

On March 9th, 1762, in Toulouse, a Huguenot merchant was broken on the wheel for a crime that he had not committed. “It is because I am a man,” declared Voltaire, that he undertook the defence of the unhappy Calas family. His efforts, writes Edna Nixon, produced a drastic reform of the French judicial system.

Long a diplomatic agent for Louis XV, D’Eon spent the last thirty-three years of an ambiguous life in woman's dress. Edna Nixon investigates this bizarre case of early modern espionage.