Person
Jane Haldimand Marcet
1769–1858
Jane Haldimand Marcet (1769-1858) was home-educated and became an author of popular works of chemistry, botany, religion, and economics. Her works on economics (sometimes anonymously published to pass as works by male authors) elucidated with a satirical, light-hearted, popular touch matters addressed more abstrusely by Smith, Ricardo, Mill, Malthus, and other economists of her day.
Her most renowned work, <i>Conversations on Chemistry</i> (1806), was so enticing and clearly written that it is famous for inspiring the youthful, dyslexic Michael Faraday, apprenticed at the bookbinder’s shop where it was being produced, to a lifetime of dedicated broad vision that ultimately became the foundation of electromagnetic technology today. Her subsequent expositions of economics, among other subjects, were equally inspiring and widely-read. Late in life, she began to revise her explanations of simplistic labor/wage matters, rewriting some of her earlier essays to accord with more modern developments.
Titles
- John Hopkins’s Notions on Political Economy (author)
- Essays (Glamorgan Pamphlets) (author)