Susan Isaacs’ work was groundbreaking in the professional fields of education, psychoanalysis and psychology. She also had a strong influence on the way middle-class mothers brought up their young children in the pre-Spock era of the nineteen thirties in Britain by acting as an agony aunt : answering readers’ questions in the Nursery World. This new biography of her is enriched by having access to the paperwork of the British psycho-analytic establishment; thus enabling a greater description of significant part she played in the development of the field.