SOURCE: Fletcher, Loraine. “The Royal Rat.” New Statesman and Society 7, no. 325 (21 October 1994): 38-9.

In the following review, Fletcher compliments Tomalin's writing in Mrs. Jordan's Profession: The Story of a Great Actress and a Future King, though she argues that Tomalin's conclusion is inadequate.

Claire Tomalin's biographies hum with love and anger—an anger civilised and well-researched, and all the more effective for that. Her women's lives were obscured by prudent contemporaries or written out of the record by academics, and we know by now how well she will beat the conspiracy.

She has never found a more appealing subject than Dora Jordan [in Mrs. Jordan's Profession: The Story of a Great Actress and a Future King]. Through the last 20 years of the 18th century, and almost to her death in 1816, Dora was the best-loved comic actress in Britain, with brief intervals of disfavour whipped up by the press...