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Philip Graham, an academic child and adolescent psychiatrist with connections to psychoanalysis and education, has written an engrossing and sympathetic biography of the British educator and psychoanalyst Susan Isaacs . The opening chapters offer a reconstruction of her early family life, including the lingering illness and death of her mother when she was six years old, and her adolescent rejection of religion, which prompted her father to refuse to support her educational aspirations.
Isaacs's two marriages are also described in this book. Little is known about her relationship with her first husband, botanist William Brierley, and the marriage lasted only a few years. (He would later marry psychoanalyst Marjorie Brierley.) Isaacs and her second husband, Nathan Isaacs, shared a strong intellectual bond reinforced by mutual respect and affection, which apparently was not undermined by Nathan's longstanding affair with a colleague of Isaacs (Graham, p. 144).
In 1908 Isaacs was finally able to train as an infant teacher at Manchester University, where she so impressed her professors that they encouraged her to switch to a full Honours degree in Philosophy. She then pursued a degree in psychology at Cambridge. For three years between 1924 and 1927, Isaacs directed the progressive school Malting House in