Christian missions were an important factor in African social history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, shaping ideas about gender relations, family and kinship, marriage, and motherhood. This has been shown by Kristin Mann's book about the marriage choices of the Christian elite in colonial Lagos (1985) and, more recently, by books by Meredith McKittrick (2002), Dorothy Hodgson (2005), and Phyllis Martin (2010). The title of Prevost's book suggests that it is a contribution to this dynamic field. However, although Prevost uses two African case studies – Madagascar (from 1867 to 1923) and Uganda (from 1895 to 1930) – and frequently employs the concept of (religious) ‘encounter’, African experiences and perspectives seem to be of marginal interest to her study. Her object is the reconstruction of the British side of women's missionary communities and the impact of mission encounters ‘in the periphery’ on progressive movements in Britain, with particular focus on British Anglican women's perspectives. In order to do this, she focuses on four Anglican organizations – the Church Missionary Society (CMS), the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG), the Mothers' Union (MU), and the League of the Church Militant (LCM).

The book is divided into two parts, the first dealing with the activities of female missionaries in Africa and the second examining the influence of mission Christianity on discussions in Britain about women's suffrage and the ordination of women in the Anglican Church. The chapters on Africa are based on a close reading of missionary correspondence, complemented by other missionary sources and, but only rarely, by secondary literature. Chapters 1 and 2 discuss the beginnings of the employment of single women as missionaries by the SPG in Madagascar and the CMS in Uganda respectively, while Chapters 3 and 4 examine the activities of the MU in these places. Madagascar and Uganda were two very different mission fields. In the former, female missionaries had already arrived in the precolonial period, when Protestant missions were affiliated with the Merina government; but after the French colonial take-over in the mid-1890s they faced the challenges of accelerated social change and French colonial education policies. In Uganda, where female CMS agents arrived only after the establishment of the British protectorate in 1894, Protestantism appealed to Africans through its association with the Ganda political elite.

Prevost's approach is not a comparative one; rather, she demonstrates the variety of missionary activities that developed in response to local conditions. In Madagascar in the early period, boarding schools were the centrepiece of a strategy of female evangelization aimed at separating young girls from what missionaries regarded as the degrading influences of the African social environment. Meanwhile, in Uganda, where the missionaries were concerned with a perceived discrepancy between the eager adoption of the trappings of Christianity and European civilization on the one hand and a lack of inner religious devotion on the other, the focus was on religious education and literacy training for adult women and on medical work. The importance of African initiatives for successful evangelization becomes clear in these chapters: African teachers, bible women, catechists, and MU branch secretaries are mentioned, although their stories are not explored. Prevost's main concern is how British missionary women saw and represented themselves and their work as being central to their mission's success. She also strives to show how their firsthand experiences of African religious practices and social organization (including polygamy) changed their own thinking about Christianity and gender. However, the examples given – such as the admission of divorcees to the MU in Uganda, which deviated from requirements in Britain – seem to have been pragmatic responses to constraints on the ground rather than, as is claimed, ‘a dramatic reformulation of Protestant ideology’ (p. 180).

The limits of the discussion are set by the almost exclusive reliance on the correspondence of a small number of missionary women, with minimal contextualization and little critical reflection about the problems that such material presents. Owing to their richness in detail and personal style, missionary letters can be alluring sources; but they must be read against the grain and checked against complementary sources. For example, the SPG women may have ‘defined their function in the Madagascar mission field as serving the Malagasy’ (p. 69), but what exactly does this mean and what did the Malagasy think of it? Similar considerations apply to missionaries from other societies and the colonial authorities: most of them probably defined their purpose in the same way, yet they may have acted very differently. A narrow empirical basis also characterizes the second part of the book, which analyses the ways in which the LCM and the MU utilized women's active roles in overseas mission as an argument in their struggle for female emancipation in Britain from 1900 to 1930. This is the more to be regretted as there are some fascinating aspects, such as the creation of links between MU branches in Britain and overseas by means of exchanges of letters between individual members of these branches. The first overseas branch to establish such a link was the one in Madagascar. However, as the corresponding British branch has not been identified and the letters themselves are not presented (and have not been found?), the discussion remains abstract and it is difficult to sense what these epistolary exchanges meant for women who participated in them. The study raises interesting questions, but answering them requires that we look beyond missionary rhetoric.