Rhonda Anne Semple's monograph is a valuable addition to the burgeoning field of missionary scholarship. Based on extensive research, mainly in the archives of the London School of Oriental and African Studies and the National Library of Scotland, she first describes the selection and training of candidates in three missionary bodies: the London Missionary Society (LMS), the Scots Presbyterian Missions, and the China Inland Mission (CIM). Three case studies, of the LMS in North India, the Church of Scotland's Eastern Himalayan Mission, and the CIM's school for children of missionaries in Chefoo, illustrate the organizational differences and varying successes of the three bodies between 1865 and 1910. The LMS, an interdenominational society with an evangelical mission, oversaw “a widely-based mission with a character that reflected both the locale and something of the individuality of specific workers” (195) but was prone to infighting between missionaries and had little success in attracting native converts in North India. The Scots Missions, the only denominational mission in the study, profited from having established administrative structures, while their work reflected Scottish emphasis on the importance of education at the expense of evangelical preaching. The CIM, founded by Hudson Taylor and to a certain extent his private preserve, was powerfully influenced by the midcentury Evangelical revival and the holiness movement, producing an emphasis on evangelical work by missionaries recruited for their zeal rather than their education, and dedicated to living in the same conditions as the local people. Finally, Semple shows how missionary work became increasingly professionalized in the late-Victorian period through creating exclusive qualifications, both secular and religious, and how the private and public roles of mission women complicated this process.

The main strengths of Semple's work are its comprehensiveness and comparative focus. As she points out (8), this is the first comparative analysis of women's roles in British missions. Her primary aim is gender analysis, and much of the book focuses on comparing the respective roles of men and women, both in selection methods and in their mission work. She charts a move from mission work done by unpaid wives and daughters of male missionaries in the 1860s and 1870s to the arrival of more educated single women in the 1880s, creating tensions over their place in mission hierarchies and the nature of their duties. Her analysis of selection and training practices also illustrates the greater importance of social class and respectability in recruiting suitable women when compared with male recruitment. Some of this is familiar in outline, but the detailed descriptions of how gender relations affected missionary practice both at home in the roles of women's organizations in the selection process, and in the field, provide empirical evidence not previously available. In particular, she challenges the belief in the relative equality of male and female missionaries within the CIM, claiming that women's roles in the CIM differed little from those in the other two mission organizations (154–55). However, her choice to study the Chefoo school, exclusively for the children of Western missionaries, while useful in showing the “unique mission identity” of the CIM (188), is somewhat peripheral to an analysis of gendered roles within the organization. More helpful would have been for her to analyze women's work in a specific geographical area, as she does in India.

What I missed is the personal level of missionary experience. Semple regrets the lack of surviving personal papers (12) and field journals, particularly those required by the CIM (9). This may partly be a result of her focus on the Chefoo school, since at least among a small Methodist sect, the Bible Christians, whose missionaries to China initially went out under the CIM auspices, a couple still exist. Semple does give us tantalizing glimpses of individual lives without fully explaining their circumstances. This appears to be, at least in part, because an appendix to which she frequently refers the reader (e.g., 85, 93, 222) does not provide the additional details she promises, perhaps omitted for reasons of space. In general, the book shows some signs of the difficulty of wrestling with a complex and diffuse body of material and could have more carefully edited. Some of the material is repetitive, particularly in the final chapter, and Semple uses the same quotation on pages 142 and 220. This does not detract from the book's overall usefulness; it is required reading for all historians of foreign missions and historians of Victorian religion in general.