It is a sad truth of writing histories about women that the first task is often to recover their very existence, so much have the professional lives of women been absented from the record or obscured by fantasy. Scott begins with an examination of the problematic status of historical evidence of actresses in early modern France, in particular the issue of anecdotes. She follows this with analysis of the historical roots of antitheatrical prejudice as it affected the lives of early actresses. Together with a brief introduction, these initial chapters provide a solid basis for the subsequent five sections that progress in chronological order from 1540 to 1750. Chapter 3, for instance, looks at women on the stage in France from the sixteenth century to the 1620s, penetrating the obscurity of the historical record to show the significant involvement of women in the growth and stabilization of French theatre, even as these women led lives that were often ‘free of the constraints imposed by extended families, neighborhoods, parishes, and guilds’ (p. 99).

Evidence of women in theatre may be located in legal contracts and civil records, but to fully understand what actresses were doing on the stage requires reasoned speculation. Scott's next chapter delves into the 1630s – a liminal decade in French theatre – and illuminates the world of actresses through inference by analysing the roles they performed and the material written for them. Corneille's early work offers, for example, ‘a special opportunity to look at how the presence of skilful actresses might have influenced the plays that were written for a troupe’ (p. 104). Then we are taken up to the establishment of the Comédie-Française in 1680 and the actresses who worked with Molière and Racine. These men wrote for their actresses, seduced them, controlled them, coached their performance styles and otherwise left an indelible mark on their reputations. Scott challenges the commonplaces attached to these women's biographies formed by their association with the two playwrights.

The later chapters, covering the period from 1680 to 1750, illuminate French actresses from two important perspectives: their skill in the art of acting as it was understood (and increasingly theorized) in the early eighteenth century and the ‘perilous financial seas’ (p. 246) they necessarily navigated in a theatre industry that had grown increasingly precarious. These chapters analyse, on the one hand, what may have been meant by descriptions of ‘simple’ or ‘natural’ acting, and narrate, on the other, the complex personal relationships women maintained to sustain a livelihood in the theatre. Scott ends with a discussion of famous French actresses in the afterlife of film and theatre biographical depiction. Mestivier, Le Noir, Béguin, Villiers, Beauchâteau, Du Parc, Béjart, Champmeslé, Dumesnil, Clairon, Lecouvrer and more: the women of the early modern French stage are given new voice as Scott recovers the lives of unknown actresses, dispels falsehoods about known ones, clarifies important changes over the length of two centuries in France, and reveals women on the stage as an active force in shaping the drama.