Nothing quite catches the eye like the promise of sex. This tease of a book (a pleasing companion to Virginia Rounding's more scholarly Les Grandes Horizontales,
published earlier this year) follows five prominent "fallen" Englishwomen across the long 19th century, tracing individual lives and changing societal attitudes. Patterns emerge of how women entered and left the profession, along with insight into the comparative public lives of men and women, the legal status of many long-term relationships, and the interesting habit of "kept" women taking the name of their first major client, oddly like slaves of the American South taking their masters' names. All through, Hickman (Daughters of Britannia: The Lives and Times of Diplomatic Wives
) seems as interested in the finances of the demimonde as many of her subjects are, but it's unclear whether she intends this as a measure of courtesans' value in a market or whether she has simply become as fascinated as contemporary observers were with dinners, jewels and fashions. Her chatty footnotes catch the reader up on the gossip and personalities of the time and elaborately link characters across the different narratives. Occasionally, her central figures get lost in the discussion of their associates, rivals, clients, cooks and dressmakers. Her account of Elizabeth Armistead, in particular, lingers as much on Armistead's famed protector and later husband, the Whig politician Charles Fox, as on the woman herself. Hickman addresses issues of attraction and sex appeal as best she can from her sources, but frankly, one is left wondering what happened in the bedroom. Was all of the courtesan's charm in the seduction? 16 pages of color photos not seen by PW. (Dec.)
