This is a very welcome addition to the study of women in theatre history. The introduction strikes at the division between studies of the dramatic text and of theatrical performance by using Bratton's concept of intertheatricality to explore representations of female desire and sexual activity. Eltis identifies the importance of ‘[c]ross-reference between plays, the interplay between alternative treatments of central situations’ (p. 7) in developing an understanding of human sexuality in nineteenth-century Britain. This was, she argues, increasingly influential to ‘debates about the structure and future of society’ (p. 3). Eltis creates her narrative of the theatrical representation of women by considering the creative possibilities of extra-textual materials. She argues convincingly for an understanding that while playwrights, eager to get their work past the censor, would only suggest many of the implications of their stories, these implications were realized nightly by performers and audiences.

Eltis's first chapter considers how conservative nineteenth-century approaches to the fallen woman placed great emphasis on individual moral choice, with a concomitant refusal to consider the exploitation of female labour and starvation wages. She gives a fresh and concise précis of this issue before offering new insights via melodramatic theatrical representation and visual culture. Melodramatic sign systems are also explored to help us understand the sensation plays about bigamy in chapter 2. Chapter 3 deploys the author's skills as a literary critic in considering the great sourcebook for the English playwright – the French stage. Such an exploration has long been sorely needed, and Eltis does it well; the chapter is especially good on Alexandre Dumas's La dame aux camélias. Chapter 4 blends literary and performance approaches to show how melodramatic forms adeptly handled potentially censorable subjects in the debate on sexual morality that surrounded Victorian legislation such as the Married Women's Property Act.

Moving on to the end of the century, we reach the instructive contrast between, on one hand, the female roles in ‘problem’ plays and their moral certainties and, on the other hand, the lives of the women who played these roles. The conclusion is that actresses led a change in sexual morality, not just because some of them supported the suffrage movement and demanded better roles in the plays of Henrik Ibsen, for example, but also from the much more comprehensive and interesting engagement in the sexual debate that was generated through their work in general. A similarly revisionist reading of the feminist playwrights of the turn of the century follows. This reading extends beyond well-known plays to show that, for example, a play by Netta Syrett given only one matinee was ahead of Cecily Hamilton's Diana of Dobson’s in depicting the dead ends of the first working lives that became possible for middle-class women. Serious reading reveals that the Melville ‘bad girl’ melodramas are not the stereotypical old-fashioned melodramas described in conventional theatre history, but a form that draws on established melodramatic character types, distinctively melded together, to write a new story of female sexuality. The book concludes with a chapter about the inter-war West End and the intertheatricality of the likes of W. Somerset Maugham and Noël Coward deliberately playing off the plot structures and characters, and hence moral attitudes, of the 1890s. This is the end of Eltis's story, and a very satisfying one, offering and substantiating a new understanding of the part played by women and by melodrama in nineteenth-century culture.