The New York Public Library has been putting on some of the best shows in New York lately. Some months ago I wrote in these pages of their exhilarating exhibition of the prints of James Gillray. Gillray turns up again in the current exhibition, “Before Victoria: Extraordinary Women of the British Romantic Era,” in the Gottesman Exhibition Hall. Indeed, not only Gillray but the two other great British masters of caricature, Thomas Rowlandson and George Cruikshank, are amply on display, lending just the right intervals of spice and wicked sauciness to a very large and varied exhibition of materials. The chance to see these three great artists is reason enough to attend, yet not the only reason to do so.

The show, much of which is drawn from the library’s remarkable Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and His Circle, breaks down into seven sections. The first of these is dedicated to Mary Wollstonecraft. She is the tutelary spirit of the show. Born in London in 1759, she grew up with all the conventional constraints upon “forwardness” (to use her word) in women and with the most meager of formal schooling. Thus her wide learning, including her acquisition of several languages and her writing ability, were entirely self-acquired.

How it is that such an unconventional creature should have emerged from such conventional circumstances is the stuff of historical mystery; we seek explanations where there may be none. Yet, as this show attests, many other “spirited” women also emerged in this period, such that we may infer that at some subterranean realm of the culture women’s contributions were somehow being encouraged.

Wollstonecraft inherited neither money nor property, which in 18th century England seriously undermined a woman’s marriage prospects. Women’s employment opportunities were limited, and after a failed stint as a teacher, Wollstonecraft turned to writing for a living. (We perhaps forget that a great many women wrote professionally in England in the 18th and early 19th centuries.) She fell in with the London community of Unitarians, whose “rational dissent” included advocacy of equal rights for women. Joseph Johnson, the Unitarian publisher, became her mentor and supporter.

Wollstonecraft repaid his patronage by writing review articles and books that made her, by the 1790s, the best-known female political writer in Europe, a devotee of Rousseau and an admirer of the French Revolution. Her 1792 “Vindication of the Rights of Woman” became a kind of clarion to the “new woman” of the era. (The show features Joseph Johnson’s first edition.) She also practiced “free love,” some details of which appeared in her husband William Godwin’s memoir of his late wife, ensuring that her reputation in Victorian times would be that of a scandalous woman rather than an important writer. She died at the age of 38 while giving birth to her and Godwin’s daughter, the future Mary Shelley, who also figures prominently in the exhibition.

The show features a very nice portrait of Wollstonecraft by John Keenan, after an original by John Opie; the copy (which William Godwin said was superior to the original) was commissioned by Aaron Burr, who as a widower raised his own daughter, Theodosia, to be a fully independent and brilliantly educated “new woman,” in part owing to the inspiration of “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.”

The next section of the exhibition, “Fables for the Female Sex,” focuses on social ideals, frequently transmitted through “conduct books,” which were intended to reinforce traditional roles for women, and to make women feel ennobled as mothers and transmitters of Christian values. It’s interesting to note that Wollstonecraft herself had written such a “conduct book” before embarking upon her career as an advocate of women’s rights and other progressive political causes.

The next section, “The Modern Venus: Politicians, Gamblers, Lovers, and Other Improper Ladies,” shows the flip side of Christian family values. Increasing numbers of women rebelled in sometimes sly and creative ways against the push for virtue, and they did so by gambling (Gillray’s hand-colored etching “Lady Godina’s Rout,” from 1796, is a gem), using their charms and wits to influence politics (in which they played no direct role), attending the theater and pleasure gardens, and entering into adulterous liaisons. Here we learn of the worlds of courtesans and prostitutes, some of whom were quite well known. Again, the great printmakers are a barometer of the social significance of forms of behavior. Some of the “political cartoons” and caricatures by Gillray and others are of a salacious nature that startles even today.

Next is “Female Patriots.” This section deals primarily with reactions, pro and con, to the French Revolution, including Wollstonecraft’s riposte to Edmund Burke’s “Reflections on the Revolution in France.” We may admire Wollstonecraft while finding her unpersuasive contra the magisterial Burke.

“Stronger Passions of the Mind” concerns literary women. Among these is Mary Robinson, shown in a gorgeous stipple engraving, from 1785, after a portrait by Sir Joshua Reynolds. Robinson was one of the most fascinating women of the time, as an actress, a mistress to the Prince of Wales, a writer, and a friend of Coleridge and Wollstonecraft. (In the April 20 New York Sun, Helen Shaw reviewed Paula Byrne’s new biography of Robinson, “Perdita.” That book seems like it might be the perfect pendant to this show.) For many, one of the show’s highlights will be the delightful “Friendship Album” of Anne Wagner, produced in Liverpool between 1795 and 1834. These collage-like albums, making use of words, images, cuttings, and so on, commemorating and celebrating friendships, are rightly likened to Joseph Cornell’s boxes by curators Stephen Wagner and Elizabeth Campbell Denlinger.

“Rational Dames and Intrepid Travelers” deals with scientific women and travelers. Among these was Lord Byron’s daughter, Ada. A mathematician, she was a friend of Charles Babbage, and the show features a letter she wrote to him. (The computer programming language ADA is named for Ada Byron.) The show has a lovely watercolor by an unknown artist (c. 1835) of the fair Ada. It seems mostly a matter of convenience that scientific women and travelers should be placed together. The travelers include Frances Wright and Frances Trollope.

Wright attempted and utterly failed to found a Utopian community, Nashoba, in Tennessee. Mrs. Trollope had hoped to teach there, but went on to open an ill-fated dry goods bazaar in Cincinnati, write a nasty book on Americans, and become one of the most successful novelists of her time – so much so that her son Anthony’s early novels were published as “by the son of Mrs. Trollope.” Indeed, I wish there were a little more on Mrs. Trollope in the show – I feel she might, in the heartaches and bright diversity of her life, have served to close out the show as Mary Wollstonecraft opened it. Instead, “The Youngest Romantics” takes us into the Victorian era with materials relating to George Eliot, the Brontes, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Victoria herself.

“Before Victoria” is a tad unwieldy, and not all the parts cohere to tell a story. But that’s all right. Out of this period came some of the most distinctive female voices in British history – Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Robinson, Frances Trollope, Georgiana Cavendish (the Duchess of Devonshire), Fanny Burney, Mary Shelley, and, not least, though underrepresented in the show, Jane Austen. None achieved what she did by following a prescribed pattern. Yet achieve they all did, each in her own way, against social constraints yet seemingly with the tacit indulgence of a complex culture, thrillingly evoked here.

Until July 30 (Fifth Avenue at 42nd Street, 212-930-0800).