While predominantly about the lives of elite women in northern India in the late nineteenth century, Ruby Lal's study deliberately and self-consciously crosses chronological, disciplinary, and in some cases geographical boundaries to explore the larger theme of female “playfulness” as a form of resistance in the face of confining social structures.

Lal establishes the fluidity of her approach in her prelude, in which she describes her friendship with and intellectual debt to Azra Kidwai, a woman born to an aristocratic family near Lucknow in 1945. Much of the prelude is devoted to a biography-cum-oral history of Azra, whose reminiscences provided the inspiration for the book's structure. As justification for her use of a late twentieth-century story as the lens through which to view the practices of an earlier century, Lal argues that “the way we think today . . . constitutes the past” and suggests that the continuity of women's experience motivates her to “challenge habits of historical narration in which we are chronologically bound” (4, 5).

In Azra's life story, she grants particular significance, on the one hand, to texts—the fictional and didactic readings that provided models for her behavior—and, on the other, to physical places—the very different houses she moved between. These two categories, the textual and the spatial, in turn form the basis for Lal's discussion of nineteenth-century girlhood and womanhood. The book is divided into a preliminary historiographical chapter that establishes the conceptual framework of her argument, then four chapters focusing on “The Forest,” “The School,” “The Household,” and “The Rooftops.” These four paradigmatic spaces, which are to varying degrees literal or metaphorical, are each in turn illuminated by a series of texts that speak either directly or indirectly to changing women's roles. Throughout, Lal walks the line between historical and literary analysis, noting that her book “is self-consciously not a history of anything called the real girl, or womanhood. . . . It is a close investigation of feminine figures” in nineteenth-century writing; thus, she says, “it is also a history of literary imaginations, prescriptive models and texts, which become part of the training and lives of women from the later nineteenth century to today” (53).

Lal's first chapter, “Texts, Spaces, Histories,” situates her work as part of an ongoing conversation about the “woman question,” which played a central role in reformist discourses of the late nineteenth century in India as well as in Britain. As she points out, colonial critiques of the position of Indian women helped link the question of women's education and development to modernity in fundamental ways. The result was a certain fixity of expectations for women's behavior, particularly in the respectable classes, by the end of the century. But focusing merely on the resultant “disciplined” woman figure—as has become common among historians, she argues—blinds us to sites of resistance and counternarrative, to the all-important “playfulness” she seeks to restore to the lives of the girl-child/women whose “becoming” she investigates (34). In order to do so, she dips both forward and backward in time, looking for moments and spaces of creativity in women's lives.

“The Woman of the Forest” takes as its central text an 1803 written version of the traditional tale of Rani Ketki. Lal reads the tale as subversive and playful in both style and substance: in the former case, as it blurred generic and linguistic boundaries; in the latter, as it posited the site of the forest as a liminal space in which women could explore multiple roles, play the part of heroes, and even express sexual desire. The forest of the early nineteenth century thus represented “a female world not yet domesticated” and freer than that of later decades (63). “The Woman of the School” goes on to examine the way this tale disappears, or is editorially reframed, in the later nineteenth century. The institutionalization of education in nineteenth-century India, which saw girls educated outside of their homes for the first time, created a market for literature that could be safely used to educate them. Lal focuses chiefly on the 1859 Vamamanranjan (or “Tales for Women”), which does not include Rani Ketki's tale. Based in part on the author's inclusion of the story in another anthology—aimed at British civil servants, rather than Indian schoolgirls—Lal argues that this exclusion is significant. While the tales in the Vamamanranjan are full of strong women, these figures are characterized almost exclusively by self-sacrifice in the name of duty and family. The collection makes it clear, she suggests, that “the ‘freedom of the forest’ was not a message that girls and women were expected to absorb” (116).

“The Woman of the Household” turns to the late nineteenth-century domestic space as an arena increasingly dominated by men's ideas of how women should behave and chooses as its texts a group of five conduct manuals or treatises written between 1867 and 1874. Lal situates these writings as part of a distinct historical moment of class anxiety on the part of respectable Muslims, which in turn created a need to define women in both reformist and traditional ways. Turning away from this constrictive domestic setting in “The Woman of the Rooftops,” Lal becomes extremely expansive in her analysis, defining the “rooftop” as both a literal terrace and also a metaphorical liminal zone encompassing everything from her earlier forest to “other spaces of transgression such as dreams” (170). She also analyzes three very disparate texts written by women (a first for this volume) born between 1840 and 1940, from Uttar Pradesh to Morocco. Through concluding with these memoirs and stories, Lal wishes to emphasize her point that “the life of the girl-child and woman could never be limited to the physical, social, and psychological spaces prescribed for her” (198).

Throughout her volume, Lal's writing is clear, her research thorough and extremely well documented. Purists may be troubled by her blurring of boundaries, but the explicitness with which she makes her case for doing so lets readers know what to expect. While her insistence on the possibilities for subversion may at times seem overly optimistic given her material, Lal's excavation of an archive of largely unknown or untranslated texts, and her provocative analysis of them, makes this book well worth reading for those interested in the period and issues she discusses, in India or beyond.