Lisa Sigel's Making Modern Love is one of a growing number of works that challenge the central role often ascribed to sexology in the formation of sexual identities. Sigel makes a strong case for the value of such analysis in the interwar period: “because it is only during those years that people began to write about sex in mass numbers. In other words, the project simply follows the sources” (10). The resulting study focuses more on popular culture than on elite texts, builds meaningful contrasts between marginal and marital sexualities, and explores a diversity of desires understood as part of an ongoing dialogue with printed texts.

In the first chapter, Sigel sets out to reconfigure the reader's understanding of how sexual identities formed in the interwar period by identifying the most important texts and contexts. The rise of interwar consumer culture, the trauma and loss caused by the First World War, and the anxieties and opportunities caused by young women's greater freedoms were all important factors in this period when an increasing number of Britons “organized their own sexual stories and set themselves out as sexual agents” (47). Most important in informing those self-perceptions were not the small print runs of the works of sexology, Sigel argues, but rather the hundreds of thousands of copies of Marie Stopes's 1918 Married Love or the weekly appearance of magazines such as London Life. Contributing to the distinctive tone of these publications were the British laws against obscenity, which regulated the distribution of works with the potential to “corrupt and deprave” those exposed to them. This led to a print culture where genital sex could not be described, but a corset, silk stockings, or other objects could stand in as markers of sexual desire for those “in the know.” Sigel also demonstrates that the impact of these works was not limited to Britain, because newsagents across the empire acted as distribution nodes for the interwar ephemera created in London.

In exploring these just-legal publications, Sigel makes her strongest contributions to the scholarly conversation. Sigel is the first to make extensive use of London Life and to document its role as “the premier fetish magazine in the United Kingdom” throughout the interwar period (81). High heels, cross-dressing, rubber clothing, amputations, female boxers, tattoos, and corsets were among the topics regularly featured in the magazine. Sigel shows the connections between some of the most prominent fetish themes and their specific time and place, so that a discussion of female boxers is linked with anxieties over the “new woman,” female amputees to men's trauma during the war, and corsets to nostalgia for a lost past. This material is used to argue that “these sexual desires . . . emerged from the context of their times” and that “these stories did not come fully articulated from the center of the self but emerged slowly as part of a consumer process” (111).

How readers interacted with texts to form the stories that they told about themselves is a theme that runs throughout the book, and it is applied to marital sexuality in the second chapter. Following the methodology set out by Jonathan Rose, Sigel examines the thousands of letters sent to Marie Stopes after the publication of Married Love. Stopes believed that her work cast aside the dead weight of Victorian practices, “bringing individuals into the age of pleasure and health, mutuality and spiritual union” (65). By copying her mix of clinical and spiritual language, couples gained a new way to speak about sexuality that prewar ideals of marriage did not provide. Yet even as readers were grateful for the new type of advice and the new language in which to express themselves, reading Married Love was still an active process for many. Readers are shown to have embraced the advice about the value of sex for a happy marriage even as they rejected the eugenics arguments with which Stopes regularly paired it.

The interplay among readers, texts, and identities is explored in a different register in the final two chapters, focusing on the fetish themes of cross-dressing and flogging in the stories of Mervyn Hyde and Frederick Holeman. Documentation on these men was preserved by the state, and Sigel uses this information and other sources to explore how a fetish might be integrated into a life beyond the self-representations in individual letters as discussed in earlier chapters. The conclusions here are also strong, demonstrating that the multiple meanings of cross-dressing did not map onto a binary of homo- and heterosexuality, and that the state only gave up flogging as a punishment for sexual crimes after psychological theory seemed to show that “punishment by flogging repeats the crime” (169).

If the analysis in the final two chapters fits well within the themes of the book, the execution is not quite as seamless as it might be. The material on neither Hyde nor Holeman is enough to sustain the discussion on its own, but it is also too extensive not to dominate the further examples within each respective chapter. This can make some of the supporting evidence, such as the discussion of James Joyce in the chapter on flogging, seem a bit uneven or superfluous. For the book as a whole, however, such moments are rare, and one of the strengths of Sigel's work is that there is very little here that does not belong. The book moves at a brisk pace, maintaining the focus on Sigel's original research and keeping summaries of secondary sources to a minimum. Making Modern Love provides a thorough exploration not only of issues concerning sexual identity but also of the dynamic process by which ideas circulate within a culture.