Following Gillian Russell's previous coedited book, Romantic Sociability: Social Networks and Literary Culture in Britain, 1770–1840 (Cambridge, 2002), this monograph offers an impressive scholarly prehistory of the phenomenon of Romantic sociability. That prehistory is based incontrovertibly in public entertainment, in particular that initiated by women—in fashion and in theater and theatricality. Russell demonstrates that the challenge of mixed-sex sociability to the hegemony of male homosociality in the 1770s was far-reaching, indeed revolutionary, playing an intriguing role beside that other more famous revolution of the decade: “High heads were capable of signifying both what the American rebels were fighting against—corruption at the metropolitan centre—and, paradoxically, what they were fighting for—the right to confront the authority of the father-state” (194).

The “woman of fashion” whose “high head”—her extravagant headdress—is paid proper attention in chapter 8 of this deliciously illustrated study is the focus of Russell's book. Russell goes beyond the many well-mapped scandals, and the lists of luxurious entertainments, that have so far been the staple of the late eighteenth-century history of wealthy metropolitan Englishwomen. She unpacks, in fascinating detail, the discursive roles of these frothy phenomena, emphasizing the destabilizing—indeed effeminizing—role of the new urbanism that circulated round Soho, the patent theaters, and the Oxford Street Pantheon. Foreign settler Teresa Cornelys (of multiple identities and mysterious origins) founded in Carlisle House the archetypal place of public entertainment that masqueraded as a private house ruled over by a lady of taste—“a space that mediated between ‘private’ and ‘public’ … that was feminized, allowing women of fashion to amplify the social and political significance of the sociability conducted within their own households” (36).

From Carlisle House it is a small step to reexamine the fashion for masquerade (chap. 3). Russell builds on Terry Castle's pioneering 1986 study, Masquerade and Civilisation, to focus more specifically on the political roles of these important social events within the context of 1770s London. This chapter works particularly brilliantly in deploying and analyzing details from contemporary reports. A similar method then turns the spotlight on Almack’s, the Coterie, and the London Pantheon. Much new material is brought to light in these chapters—there is clearly a great deal more still to be dug up and brought into the narrative of sociability. It was a short but pioneering era, to be revisited well after the revolutions and used by the female novelists of the Regency period in interesting ways: Austen's Mrs. Elton sees herself as “Lady Patroness” of the Donwell strawberry-picking party—a la Almack’s—but she is wrong in every possible way, as Mr. Knightley quietly makes clear. The metamorphosis of the Pantheon into a concert hall for the Handel Commemoration of 1784 and other musical events was symbolic: following the experiments in sociability of the 1770s, it became subsumed into a more recognizable “‘theatre royal,’ with all the social and gender hierarchies” of the more conservative eighties (117).

The two patent theater companies themselves, Covent Garden and Drury Lane, fought a constant rearguard action against perceptions that they were effeminizing “manly” British culture. Hence the popularity of the figure of the fop or male gossip in new comedies of the period—but now, unlike the overt contempt for his ambivalent sexuality displayed in Restoration drama, the focus is on his role as the cultivator of the dark side of (feminine) sociability: scandal. Russell's study turns in its last three chapters to women as theatrical performers. The scandalous public trial (in the House of Lords) of the Duchess of Kingston for bigamy is read as a theatrical event, and the duchess's fascination for dramatists such as Samuel Foote—himself the subject of gossip—once again demonstrates the permeability of generic boundaries in this period, subject as they were to the massive destabilizing forces that Russell has identified throughout this book.

Theater historians, in particular, will be thrilled by what Russell has to say about their field when she turns her attention, first, to the great comedienne and fashion icon Frances Abington and then to three plays that focus on the fashionable lady: Garrick's Bon Ton, Sheridan's The School for Scandal, and Hannah Cowley's The Belle's Stratagem. Russell rightly emphasizes the importance of epilogues in the new plays of this period: mostly spoken by the lead actress, they insisted on the audience's attending to the ambivalent relation between the principal female character of the play and the charismatic woman of fashion who performed her. As Russell comments, apropos the epilogue to Garrick's The West Indian, “The legibility of femininity within sentimental comedy is countered here by the enactment within the epilogue of the dizzying power of self-invention … suggesting that the only essentialized feminine identity is a performative one” (131). This perception leads to a rereading of the “canonical” School for Scandal—in which the epilogue powerfully undermines Lady Teazle's “reformation”—and indeed to canonicity itself, most notably in Sheridan's play's intertextuality with Cowley's hugely popular Belle's Stratagem. The latter offers a more revolutionary reading of feminine performativity within the play's many masquerades. As Russell points out, “The place of The School for Scandal in the literary canon depended on defeating the hydra” of fashion (202) embodied in the high-headed woman. It is a safe, masculine play, ultimately, trumpeting manly good sense and generosity. But theaters that depended upon the work of charismatic female performers such as Abington heightened the audience's consciousness of changes in society and sociability that were, ultimately, unstoppable. Women, Sociability and Theatre in Georgian London makes a major contribution to a more nuanced and rich history of a society that was playing its way toward fundamental change.