Author, Historian, Social Reformer. She received public acclaim for her prolific writings and for being considered one of the most prominent intelligent women of Victorian England. One of her most popular books was the 1853 “The Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte, Freely Translated and Condensed, 2 Volumes. Her books and essays were on the subjects of sociological, holistic, religious, domestic, and perhaps most controversial since she was a female, the translated works of Auguste Comte from French to English. She had a simple way of writing about very complex subjects. She gained a following with her series on economics, “Illustrated of Political Economy”, 25 Volumes from 1832 to 1834; “Poor Law and Pauper Illustrated”, 10 Volumes, from 1833 to 1834; and “Illustration of Taxation”, 5 Volumes in 1834. Many claimed that she had a “masculine intellectual”, yet she always introduced the female point of view in her writings, such as marriage, children, religion, and race relations. In 1821 she began to write anonymously for the “Monthly Repository,” an Unitarian periodical, with her second article being “Female Education.” In 1823 she published “Devotional Exercises and Addresses, Prayers, and Hymns.” Born the sixth child of eight, she was the daughter of Elizabeth Ranklin and Thomas Martineau, who was a wealthy businessman. The Martineaus were French Huguenot ancestry, but were liberal Unitarians. The family strongly supported Unitarianism; a room in Essex Hall in London, the headquarters for the British Unitarianism, was named in honor of the family's years of support. All her brothers were formally educated but none of the girls. She was self-taught by reading such authors as Thomas Malthus, which made her think seriously about sociological and political subjects. When her father's business fail after his death in 1829, she stepped forward to earn a living for the family. After her fiance, John Worthington went insane and died, she built an independent life of her own as she never married. Stepping out of her shy, meek personality to become a responsible woman was, according to her, the best thing that ever happened. Worthington was a classmate of her brother Dr. James Martineau. She was very close to James as together, they were sent to Bristol for a two-year study under Dr. Lant Carpenter, an Unitarian minister and educator. She personally knew Charles Dickens, and the character Mrs. Jelby in his book “Bleak House” is said to resemble her in many ways. She had many health problems with losing her sense of taste and smell as a child, and later her hearing to the point of using an ear trumpet. Although some reported that these handicaps were the result of emotional issues related to having a strict mother, other say these were probably complications from a childhood disease such as measles. She developed heart disease later in life. She moved to London in 1832. During the 1850s, he and his sister Harriet both published numerous articles on Unitarianism in John Chapman's radical London-based periodical, the “Westminster Review.” Returning from her trip to the United States where she traveled over 10,000 miles, she wrote “Society in America” in 1837 and “Retrospect of Western Travel” in 1838. American readers did not appreciate her writings as she wrote firmly against slavery. During this time period, she also wrote in 1839 “Deebrook,” in 1841 “The Hour and the Man” and “The Crofton Boys” and other writings about her garden near England's Lake District, where she relocated in the early 1840s. After a trip to the Middle East in 1846, she questioned her own liberal Unitarianism belief and converted publicly to Atheism in the “Letters on the Laws of Man's Nature and Development,” which was co-written with Henry G. Atkinson in 1851. Her chief historical work in 1849 was “The History of the Thirty Years' Peace, A. D. 1816 to 1846.” Although chronically ill by 1838 and completely homebound by 1855, she contributed to many periodicals with thousands of leading articles from 1852 to 1866. She frequently wrote articles on the American Civil War. She wrote over 50 books in her lifetime. Besides Dickens, she had a close circle of friends including Charles Babbage, Thomas Carlyle, George Eliot, Florence Nightingale, Thomas Mathaus, William Wordsworth who was a neighbor on the lake, Charlotte Bronte, and Charles Darwin, She championed for social reform in education, religious beliefs, slavery and of course women's rights. In fact, she may have been the first female sociologist. Her autobiography was written 1855 and edited by American abolitionist Maria Weston Chapman, who appended the book with a lengthy memoir and then published the book posthumously in 1877. A statue of Martineau was placed in the Old South Meeting-house in Boston, Massachusetts. It was commissioned by Maria Weston Chapman and was later destroyed in 1914 in a fire.