SOURCE: Cannadine, David. “Odd Union.” London Review of Books 16, no. 20 (20 October 1994): 35.

In the following review, Cannadine offers a mixed assessment of Mrs. Jordan's Profession: The Story of a Great Actress and a Future King, noting that Tomalin's documentation is “inadequate.”

The task of rescuing women from the chauvinistic condescension of male posterity has thus far been unevenly undertaken and incompletely accomplished. Writers and actresses, suffragettes and nuns, servants and prostitutes, have fared relatively well. But upper-class women—Clio's own sisters, cousins and aunts—have received much less attention. Studies of aristocratic ladies are few and far between; feminist biographies of queens and princesses are in conspicuously short supply; and royal mistresses have rarely been emancipated from the boudoired and bodiced banalities of Georgette Heyer and Barbara Cartland. Yet from the Restoration in 1660 until the early 20th century, the only English monarch who was both male and monogamous was...