Using a series of sensational court trials on issues ranging from illicit drug use and murder to an alleged virgin birth, Lucy Bland explores the emergence of the modern woman, more familiarly known to us as the flapper, and the anxieties about femininity and sexuality she incited during the interwar period. As veterans, physically and emotionally scarred from their experiences, struggled to find employment and stability in the postwar world, young women were unapologetically enjoying what one newspaper called the “sweets of liberty” (3). Like Frank Mort's and Judith Walkowitz's recent studies of twentieth-century London, Bland provides a tour of the dancehalls and drug dens of seedy Soho and Limehouse, the posh hotels of the West End, and even lower middle class suburbs, where women transgressed boundaries of race, gender, class, and ethnicity, and their lives in turn provided fodder for the scandal sheets.

Some of the scandals and trials in Bland's book may seem familiar to many readers, such as chapter 3's account of the unjust arrest and execution of twenty-eight-year-old Edith Thompson for her husband's murder by her nineteen-year-old lover, Freddie Bywaters (previously analyzed with great expertise by Matt Houlbrook). Marek Kohn's Dope Girls (2003) has already introduced the drug underground and such figures as Brilliant Chang and Billie Carleton, who feature in Bland's second chapter. Nevertheless, Bland finds fascinating points of intersection among the cases and imposes a chronology and framework for analysis that breathes new life into these stories, using court transcripts, press reports and editorials, letters, memoirs, and also previously censored material.

Inquests into drug overdoses involving stage actress Carleton in 1918 and “dance instructress” Freda Kempton in 1922 sparked a media frenzy about the “butterfly” woman: a flighty young thing easily lured to an early death by cocaine-peddling “Chinamen,” some of whom dared to marry white English women, sparking miscegenation fears exaggerated by the press. At dance halls young women got their first taste of the “magic snow” that facilitated their late nights of partying, but while the “girls with the tired eyes” (65)—even those who overdosed—evoked pity, women who took an active lead in the drug trade, such as May Roberts, the “White Queen of Chinatown,” proved more threatening; masquerading as a society lady to sell opium in West End clubs, Roberts defied the media's narrative of innocent victims “dragged down into the underworld of Chinatown” and “broken on the iron wheel of fate” (88).

The interwar press thrived on Orientalist tropes, especially in the case of French-born Marguerite Fahmy, accused of shooting dead her wealthy Egyptian husband, Ali Fahmy, in the corridor of London's posh Savoy hotel on 10 July 1923. While Edith Thompson, a savvy and fashionable businesswoman, was castigated by the press and prosecution for her economic aspirations and sexual agency, Mme. Fahmy managed (with the aid of a great defense team) to conceal her past history as a prostitute and transform herself into a heroine who at last stood up to “the Turk in his harem” (146). As for the women queuing for seats with “breathless and unconcealed curiosity” (154), this trial sought to counter any romantic fantasies they harbored about the “exotic” male lover of the East depicted in films and novels of the day such as The Sheik. Medical records suggest that Fahmy on previous occasions likely sodomized his wife, further proof, according to the defense, of the perverse desires and cruelty of the non-Western male; the ruling of “justifiable homicide,” therefore, came with a warning to all women to avoid “possibly the greatest mistake a woman could make … marrying an Oriental” (148).

Yet even when a woman married a white Western male, happiness was not a guarantee, as such men sometimes failed as economic providers or in the bedroom (or both), as we see in the case of the Thompsons and especially in that of the society couple John and Christabel Russell. On the surface Christabel Russell seemed the essence of a modern woman—fashionably dressed, an athlete and avid dancer, and successful businesswoman—but her distaste for and lack of knowledge about sexual intercourse surprised the listeners in the packed courtroom. Having never achieved full penetration with his wife, John accused her of adultery and refused to recognize the child she bore as his own, putting the future title of Lord Ampthill at stake. Two divorce trials and two appeals from 1923 to 1926 finally legitimized the child, but in the process such intimate details as John's predilection for cross-dressing and Christabel's intact hymen (hence the “virgin birth”), obsessed the international press. The case ultimately led to stricter censorship of the press in the reporting of divorce cases, but revealed in the process that despite the availability of bestsellers like Marie Stopes's Married Love (1918)—a copy of which John Russell had given his wife in 1919—many men and women still remained woefully ignorant about sex in the so-called modern age.

Christabel's almost defiant pride in her asexuality stood in stark contrast to the sexual knowingness of Maud Allan; the 1918 case with which Bland begins her book makes the two trials perfect bookends for this nuanced analysis of the multiple versions of the modern woman. Allan, already famous for her “barefoot dancing,” brought a criminal libel suit against the right-wing Independent MP Noel Pemberton Billing, for his accusations of lesbianism in a paragraph headed “The Cult of the Clitoris” in the February 1918 edition of his paper, the Vigilante. Much like the end result of Oscar Wilde's libel suit (Lord Alfred Douglas even makes an appearance, denouncing his former lover and Wilde's play Salome, in which Allan performed the title role), Allan soon found her own character on trial, accused in the press and courtroom of everything from sadism and a lesbian affair with Prime Minister Asquith's wife, Margot, to, last but not least, espionage. Threats to the nation did not just reside in the opium dens of Limehouse but at the very top of society, and the ruling in favor of Billings reminded women that sexual nonconformity (indeed, even knowing the meaning of the word “clitoris”) was itself a form of treachery.

While Bland notes the press's “focus on the visual” (213), one weakness of the book involves the underuse of the photographic images she includes; she often presents photos merely to comment on the women's appearances, or with no comment at all, such as the image of Edith Thompson seated between her lover and husband (120) so that we never learn from this account how well the two men knew each other; nor does she detail how media photography evolved in response to the cinematic images of flappers that dominated the era. The brief section called “Afterlives” reinforces just how inadequately (and often cruelly) these women's lives were “explained” by commentators at the time, and also left me wanting to know more about some of the transgressive men we meet in Bland's narrative, especially the “Great Defender,” Marshall Hall, whose theatrical antics entertained packed courtrooms. Bland's masterfully written book surely will generate more debate about the messy, and sometimes violent, realities that too often accompany women's pursuit of pleasure in any age.