The life of America's first female presidential candidate

By the time she found herself testifying in a London courtroom in 1894, the 54-year-old Victoria Woodhull was used to being underestimated.

- JENNIFER SZALAI

She had grown up dirt poor—quite literally—in Homer, Ohio, living in a wooden shack whose lack of an outhouse meant that to relieve herself she had to dig holes in the ground. As a woman in 19th-century America, she had few professional opportunities to choose from, and she certainly didn't have the right to vote.

Yet none of that stopped her from becoming the first woman to found a Wall Street brokerage and the first woman to run for president. At the 1894 trial, she accused the barrister (inevitably a man) who was cross-examining her of presuming that she had an "overheated imagination": "You think this because I am a woman, and you are not disposed to entertain the notion that women can be rational human beings."

There was undoubtedly some truth to this. But as Eden Collinsworth suggests in her lush and playful new book, Woodhull was especially adept at oscillating between truth and lies. "The Improbable Victoria Woodhull" traces the extraordinary trajectory of what Collinsworth delicately calls a "controversial life."