The power and passion of M. Carey Thomas

by Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz

M. Carey Thomas (1857-1935) was an extraordinary woman whose career spanned the Victorian and modern worlds. Her story is superbly told in a biography that resonates with the complicated interplay between her necessarily hidden private life and her eminently visible and successful public life as president of Bryn Mawr College, as a founder of the Johns Hopkins medical school and the Bryn Mawr School in Baltimore, as a leader in the women's suffrage movement, and as the preeminent spokeswoman for education around the turn of the century. Behind closed doors, however, Carey Thomas was by no means the "proper Quaker daughter" many of her contemporaries assumed her to be. She was a freethinker. She was an ardent admirer of Swinburne, Rossetti, and the Pre-Raphaelites. She was a passionate woman whose lovers were women. . In rich detail and with insight and balance, Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz recounts a life lived outside the bounds of nineteenth-century convention. She shows us the child ove