This volume brings together all the available letters between historian Catharine Macaulay and a number of eighteenth-century luminaries, including George Washington, David Hume, and Mary Wollstonecraft. It includes an extended introduction by the editor which offers unique insights into Macaulay's life and the thinking of her friends and correspondents.
Green's newly published edition of Macaulay's correspondence allows us to understand the historian and political figure in her own terms as opposed to a representative of a supposedly coherent commonwealth or republican tradition, as she has often been considered since the work of Caroline Robbins and J. G. A. Pocock. Her contextually rich intellectual biography is strengthened by her immersion in Macaulay's correspondence and, for this reason alone, it offers a significant advancement on Hill's pioneering study from 1992.