This informative and affectionate study of a number of American women living in London during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries does not, with one exception, consider the wealthy American heiresses whose marriage to the English aristocracy has been described as gilded prostitution, but rather independent writers and actresses, whose work is not normally the focus of historians. In what is clearly a labour of love, which has taken the better part of two decades to complete, author Jane Gabin, a teacher of literature and an independent scholar, provides a series of individual case studies, which include, as well as Jennie Churchill, not only several writers, including journalist Elizabeth Banks and novelist Pearl Craigie, but also actresses, such as Mary Anderson and Elizabeth Robins, and other female expatriates, for example artist Julie Heyneman and poet Louise Chandler Moulton, who brought together American and British writers in her literary salon. What united these women was that they were voluntary expatriates: they chose to spend a substantial part of their lives living, often independently, in London. This, Gabin believes, denotes a special kind of woman: more specifically the American woman, whom, she argues, was particularly endowed with values of self-reliance, independence and individualism.

This is essentially a series of sympathetic narratives of each individual woman, although there are also some reflections upon expatriate society as a whole, and the London of the gilded age. With most of the works written by her subjects long out of print, Gabin painstakingly reconstructs the lives that they led in London from a range of documentary sources, including of course her subjects' own words, but also reviews of their work (both written and onstage), correspondence and contemporary articles. At times, this requires a reliance on anecdote and surmise, and some literary licence: recounting one tale, she comments, “Is this actually true? Does it matter? It's a great story” (xiii). This sometimes sits oddly in an academic historical study. Nonetheless, Gabin throws greater light on female expatriates living in London at the turn of the century, and provides a welcome extension to the existing studies of the expatriate literary tradition, which tend to focus on male authors, or the same limited group of female writers, such as Gertrude Stein and Amy Lowell.