In 1925, Scott, an English man of letters, one-time librarian and secretary to Bernard Berenson and author of The Architecture of Humanism, published this biography of Isabelle de Charriere, who wrote using the pen name Zélide. Born Isabella van Serooskerken van Tuyll in 1740, the Dutch girl earned early recognition around Europe for her precocious intellect. She had a dozen or so suitors, including the impossibly egotistical Boswell, but her uncompromising, somewhat perverse devotion to ratiocination led her to marry her brothers' lackluster tutor. Her most renowned relationship, however, took place some 15 years later, when she met Benjamin Constant, a man 27 years her junior. That eight-year relationship informs the bulk of the book and for Scott, the story of Zélide and Benjamin and Madame de Stael, the woman he left her for, is nothing less than Europe's renunciation of reason and the Enlightenment for sensibility and Romanticism.