In Phoebe Apperson Hearst: A Life in Power and Politics, Alexandra M. Nickliss offers the first biography of one of the Gilded Age’s most prominent and powerful women. A financial manager, businesswoman, and reformer, Phoebe Apperson Hearst was one of the wealthiest and most influential women of the era and a philanthropist, almost without rival, in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Hearst was born into a humble middle-class family in rural Missouri in 1842; she died a member of society’s urban elite in 1919. Most people know her as the mother of William Randolph Hearst, the famed newspaper mogul, and as the wife of George Hearst, a mining tycoon and U.S. senator. By age forty-eight, however, after her husband’s death, Hearst had come to control the family’s extravagant estate, demonstrating intelligence and skill as a financial manager.

Supporting urban reforms in the Bay Area, across the country, and around the world, Hearst gave much of her wealth to organizations supporting children, health reform, women’s rights, higher education, municipal policy formation, and urban architecture and design. She worked to exert her ideas and implement plans regarding the burgeoning Progressive movement and held many prominent positions, including as first woman regent of the University of California.

Phoebe Apperson Hearst tells the story of Hearst’s world and examines the opportunities and challenges she faced as she navigated local, national, and international corridors of influence, rendering a penetrating portrait of a fascinating and often contradictory woman.