Prologue In 1883, after her first nervous collapse, Jane Addams thought she was "a failure in every sense." She was a pretty, high-strung twenty-three-year-old with no one to love and nothing to do, living with her stepmother in rural Illinois. Within three decades, she was the most famous woman in America. In a burst of courage and will, she triumphed over the invalidism that ruined the lives of vast numbers of Victorian women and transformed herself into an international celebrity. She founded Hull-House, the immensely successful Chicago settlement, worked tirelessly to rid the nation of the worst abuses of industrialization, and wrote best-selling books that became bibles of reform during the progressive era. Though her ardent pacifism caused her popularity to plummet during World War I, the pendulum began to swing back in the thirties and in 1931, four years before her death, she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.Today, Jane Addams is widely recognized as an extraordinary figure in our nation's history, one of a roster of great Americans -- Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr. among them -- who made lasting contributions to social justice.

But as with the lives of many iconographic figures, the legend often obscures the real story. That has been particularly true of Jane Addams's early years, when she underwent a remarkable metamorphosis from a frail, small-town girl to one of the most famous women of her era. New family documents, most of which were unavailable to previous biographers, reveal for the first time the story of her difficult girlhood in a troubled Victorian family on the near frontier. They also illuminate the major struggle of her young adulthood -- the conflict between her internal drive to power and the stultifying demands of her parents (the dreaded "family claims," which she later wrote about movingly). This conflict manifested itself in a series of physical ailments that tormented her for years.The idea of writing about Jane Addams occurred to me soon after moving to Chicago with my family in 1991. As a way of introducing myself to Chicago history, I readTwenty Years at Hull-House,Jane's autobiography, and was deeply attracted to the story of the settlement's founding. But as I got deeper into the archive of Jane's papers (housed at the University of Illinois in Chicago, a few miles from my home), what most intrigued me was the material about her early years, particularly letters to and from those closest to her.

Not only were these documents fresh (most of them were discovered after the last biography of Jane, Allen F. Davis's excellentAmerican Heroine,was published in 1973), but they fit into my chief interests as a biographer -- the shaping of personality and ambition, how fate plays on character, the delineation of women's lives.They offered a chance to rescue Jane Addams from her pedestal as a saintly reformer and bring her to life as never before. What's more, they provided a window into a lost world of one-room schools and typhoid epidemics, of grand tours, romantic friendships, and "separate spheres" for the sexes. Yet, the key issues illuminated in this historical context -- the struggle to overcome depression during a period of great social change, the battle for power within families, the difficulties of women in convincing the medical establishment to recognize their physical problems -- are highly relevant today.Jane Addams grew up at a time when women had little status in public life, when submissive marriage or retiring spinsterhood was their only option. The aching dissatisfaction that Jane and her friends felt was a forerunner of "the problem that has no name," which Betty Friedan addressed in her classic 1963 best-seller,The Feminine Mystique.Friedan argued that women's core problem was the "stunting or evasion of growth" that is perpetuated by the cultural ideal of women as solely sexual and domestic beings.

The wo.