Wollstonecraft to Lady Di.

The article provides information on the book "Inventing Herself: Claming a Feminist Intellectual Heritage," by Elaine Showalter. The book promises to be a pleasantly engrossing tour of the landmarks of three centuries of Anglo-American intellectual feminism, guided by a seriously impressive scholar, Elaine Showalter. She illustrates what she means with the book's very first paragraph, in a way that seems perplexing, by equating Mary Wollstonecraft, the eighteenth-century author of "A Vindication of the Rights' of Woman," with Princess Diana, of all people, as examples of the sort of feminists, or "icons," she calls them, she is looking for. Her central theme, as it emerges in the telling, is as delicious and guiltily indulgent as a box of Godiva chocolates, the educated woman's timeless quest for identity, especially the reconciliation of love and ambition.