Jane Marcet

Conversations on Political Economy, Conversations on Natural Philosophy, Conversations on Vegetable Physiology, Willy's Grammar and The Seasons all work the same way: two pupils, Caroline and Emily, ask a teacher called Mrs Bryan awkward questions until the subject gives way. Jane Marcet invented the form in 1805 with Conversations on Chemistry, which is the reason the rest of them exist, and which a bookbinder's apprentice named Michael Faraday read and later said had started him off. She published the early volumes without her name on them. Born Jane Haldimand in London in 1769 to a Swiss merchant family, she married the physician Alexander Marcet, kept a house where scientists argued in front of her, and wrote for readers who had been given no schooling in any of it, women especially. She died in 1858.