Alison Conway makes another valuable contribution to literary scholarship of the Restoration and eighteenth century with her latest study, the first sustained exploration of the courtesan’s relationship to the development of prose narrative in England. The courtesan’s status as a figure of culture and the arts has been examined in the cases of Italy and Spain, with Conway now turning the lens onto English literary history. As its title suggests, The Protestant Whore focuses on the unique importance of a distinctly Protestant aesthetic of courtesanship by examining how Nell Gwyn serves as a “touchstone” for “reflections on women’s relation to authority in the period” (3). Conway lays the basis for this innovative argument in her introduction, proposing that a distinct “courtesan narrative” emerged in the Restoration in which “an abstraction of stories about courtesans” came together in “a larger literary paradigm,” folding together “reflections on sexual politics and religious controversy into England’s new tradition of prose fiction” (8). As Gwyn died in 1688, three years after her royal lover Charles II, Conway’s argument is, overwhelmingly, one of Gwyn’s posthumous importance, concerned with what Gwyn’s narrative came to mean in the various “backward-looking moments” (11) in which it was evoked and used to understand the Stuart legacy.

Chapter 1 examines the “invention” of the Protestant whore, tracing Gwyn’s depiction in Restoration satires. Conway argues that in these poems Gwyn, unlike Charles’s Catholic mistresses, is separated from “the political fracas of the day” and figured as “a court agent whose integrity the nation might trust because of, not despite, her sexual character” (37). Chapter 2 focuses on Behn’s Love-Letters between a Nobleman and His Sister (1684–87). Here, Conway suggests that in the character of Silvia, Behn invokes the figure of the courtesan “in order to reinscribe it in an alternative register, one fundamentally about authorship,” and in which the courtesan is identified “with the literary principles governing the writer’s craft” (53). This thought-provoking hypothesis provides new ways of conceptualizing ideas about the relationship between professional writers and readers in the period and the self-reflexive nature of early prose novels. Conway examines these ideas with regard to Behn but does not extend her argument in later chapters on Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding.

In chapters 3–5 Conway’s study increasing prioritizes questions of what the courtesan offers Protestant and political ideology of the period rather than the art of writing itself. Chapter 3 examines secret histories of 1690–1714, showing how portrayals of the courtesan played into partisan agendas during the reigns of the later Stuarts, William and Mary, and Anne. Here, Conway focuses not so much on Gwyn’s phantasmal evocations as she does on more general depictions of whoring applied to other women, most notably the Tory treatment of Queen Anne’s favorite, Sarah Churchill. Chapter 4 returns us to the early novel, with Conway reading Defoe’s Roxana (1724) as a work that creates a direct link between its eponymous character with Gwyn through Roxana’s description of herself as a “Protestant whore” (113). Defoe, Conway argues, “evokes Nell Gwyn’s legacy and the Restoration’s struggle to sustain the dream of Protestant community to plumb the narrative opportunities afforded by the title ‘Protestant Whore’” (141). Where Roxana has been chiefly read as an attempt to examine contemporary morality, Conway innovatively suggests that Defoe uses the figure of the courtesan to explore “his utopic dreams of the prostitute’s unlimited ability to create wealth” (housing the means of its production in her body) “and the dystopic sense that new forms of social regulation and control encroach in profound ways on the individual” (113). In her final chapter, Conway considers the relationship between courtesan narrative and Jacobite reflections on the moral dimension of power, focusing on Richardson’s Clarissa (1748) and Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749). Here, the relationship to Gwyn’s narrative becomes less clear, with Conway examining Clarissa’s Protestant singularity in light of the “greatest betrayal” she suffers in the novel at the hands of other women—the courtesans pretending to be Lovelace’s aunt and cousin (154). Extending her analysis to Tom Jones, Conway reads the narrator’s allusion to an anecdote about Nell Gwyn as an attempt to naturalize the term “whore,” neutralizing the “threat” posed by Jenny Cameron, and shoring up Sophia’s “innocence and disinterestedness” (167).

In The Protestant Whore, Conway employs the idea of “courtesan narrative” to “weave a common thread” through “readings of a disparate group of novelists,” with Gwyn serving “as a lightning rod through which the energy of restoration anxieties travels” (8). While Conway gestures to the artistic and cultural promise of the courtesan as a figure who can help us better understand modes of literary and cultural production in the period, the prioritization of political readings of specific courtesan moments in texts overshadows a more sustained analysis of what exactly the figure was understood to represent in the period. Indeed, Conway herself acknowledges that “different genres produce a spectrum of courtesan representations” (40), the full heterogeneity of which is never made clear. This is especially the case in the absence of any sustained discussion of the courtesan’s depiction in drama of the period, for example, in the plays of Behn, Dryden, Otway, Lee, and Rowe. Yet, Conway’s study does have notable strengths, most clearly in her rejection of a religious and political reading of these works made through a simple Catholic-Protestant binary. Rather, Conway uses literary treatment of the whore to emphasize the complex diversity of English Protestantism as portrayed in prose of the long eighteenth century, attending to how its failure to become a truly unified faith was played out in the early novel.