In her chapter on Emilia Francis (later, Lady Dilke), Colleen Denney writes that “Victorians were guilty for delighting in the saucy details of the scandal at the same time as they projected an outward shell of moralistic judgment” (86). The protagonists Denney selected for her perceptive narrative about “scandalous” women were born into the rapidly expanding middle classes: Mary Elizabeth Braddon (1835–1915), Lady Dilke (1840–1904), Millicent Garrett Fawcett (1847–1929), and Sarah Grand (1854–1943). This decision (which is unexplained by the author) excludes a figure like Frances Evelyn “Daisy,” Countess of Warwick, author and activist, referred to in the press as the “red countess.” Denney weaves together the lives of these women with visual representations, focusing primarily on painted portraits but also considering photographs and caricatures in the popular press. The concerns that frame the women’s stories and Denney’s text include issues of constructed identities and relationships, and how those interact with both professionalism and scandal. As Denney states, her “study acknowledges the necessity for woman to negotiate the modern world at times of crisis with visual and verbal weapons of persuasion that help her to formulate her identity as a site of conformity and/or resistance” (30). She combines her historical discussion with a theoretical framework that complements and complicates the discussion. Finally, each chapter ends with excerpts selected from material contemporary with the subjects, which offers readers a miscellany of voices from the past to complement Denney’s retrospective analyses.

Organizing the discussion chronologically, Denney begins with Braddon, “a Victorian sensation novelist most renowned for her 1862 mystery, Lady Audley’s Secret” (40). While recognized as a successful author, and a scandalous one at that, she was painted by William Powell Frith in a portrait exhibited in 1865 at the Royal Academy. It portrays Braddon in sombre work dress standing beside her writing desk in a shadowed interior space. The Royal Academy exhibition catalogue clearly identified the portrait as that of the “celebrated novelist,” while the painting showed viewers a “confident, in charge, and trustworthy” woman (43). Denney argues that Braddon moved between the public perception of scandal and her personal attempts to control or possibly manipulate her respectability while, at the same time, she functioned in a world dominated by men. Representations of Braddon, both in Frith’s 1865 portrait and as a member of the audience shown in Frith’s Private View at the Royal Academy (1881), consolidate her public self with her domestic environment.

Hubert von Herkomer’s portrait of Denney’s second case study, Lady Dilke, presents “an at-ease woman of rank, about to go out for the evening” (108), where Dilke’s public face as a critic and activist has been erased. Coincidentally, this portrait remained in the Dilkes’ home, never to be exhibited during its subject’s lifetime. Perhaps her role as a political wife, one who supported her fiancé (soon husband) through scandal and public rebuke, challenged Emilia Dilke “to draw on multiple forms of authority for women” (112). As Denney successfully argues, Dilke’s identity “as constructed in the Herkomer portrait acts as a site of contestation.” A middle-class woman who “married up,” her portrait “gives us a conflation of middle-class integrity and aristocratic power” (95). Tangentially, Denney argues that Dilke’s “exceptional marriage” can be compared to the highly publicized relationships of Hillary Rodham Clinton and Diana, Princess of Wales, and that in the Herkomer portrait, Dilke, like the later celebrated figures, “was putting on a brave face” (88).

Although much has been written about the third subject, Millicent Garrett Fawcett, Denney’s analyses of visual representations of her combined with a synthesis of relevant secondary literature provide readers with a fresh, insightful picture of this major figure in the struggle for women’s rights. Denney’s discussion of a sketch of a women’s rights meeting reproduced in the widely circulated Graphic (1872) alongside Ford Madox Brown’s painting Mr. and Mrs. Henry Fawcett (1872) and Bertha Newcombe’s painting Elizabeth Garrett and Emily Davies Presenting the 1866 Women’s Suffrage Petition to John Stuart Mill (1910) raises questions about identity. Denney argues that engagement with the three images provides “a foundation for Garrett Fawcett’s vision of how she would embody the cause and hence resist the scandals normally associated with a woman standing on a platform and asserting her voice” (128). Denney also mentions the difficulties of reading accurately images of this immensely public historical figure who has provided feminists with much gist for narrative and analyses. In her own discussion, she sets out “to show how Garrett Fawcett literally personified resistance to the ideological constructions of Victorian culture” and how this was negotiated in tandem with a high-profile marriage (133). Garrett Fawcett may have been Denney’s greatest challenge—she readily acknowledges that Garrett Fawcett “is perhaps the most complex, the most problematic for historians,” and thus for Denney the most difficult “personally to capture” (165). However, it is this very difficulty that makes the chapter such a fascinating study of a Victorian woman who “resisted cultural norms while at the same time seeming to comply with them” (165).

Like Garrett Fawcett, Sarah Grand made tremendous efforts to display acceptable femininity alongside her successes as an author of scandalous novels, the first of which, The Heavenly Twins (1893), “dealt with men’s sexuality and venereal disease for the first time in literary history” (179). In her discussion of Sarah Grand, Denney introduces the concept of the masquerade and the “layering of such representation” (180). Grand was a “New Woman” of the 1890s and, as such, was photographed in a cycling outfit beside her bicycle; she also sat for a portrait by Alfred Praga, Mrs. Frances Elizabeth McFall (Madame Sarah Grand) (1896). According to Denney, and complementing her discussion of masquerade, Grand “succeeded in her determination to present a radical woman in conventional guise” (191). Certainly as a New Woman, Grand dealt with both her public and private identities in conjunction with the layering and complications involved in this “splitting.” She was, as Denney suggests, “a member of the first generation of women who could use the media to their advantage” (196). Thus she makes an appropriate fourth case study before Denney abandons historical protagonists for a fictional representation.

The fifth chapter addresses what Denney terms the “cultural critique” of Oscar Wilde’s play An Ideal Husband, written in 1893 and first performed in London in 1895. It is through the lens of the play, Denney suggests, that the fame of three of the women in her story becomes evident; she sees aspects of them realized in the major female characters (Braddon played only a slight role in this analysis). The play, asserts Denney, makes clear how visible the women were and “how central they were to the developing discourse of feminism by the mid-1890s” (212). Wilde, as Denney notes, was familiar with women’s issues, and as editor of Woman’s World (1887–89), “he invited prominent women of letters to write for the magazine, including Lady Dilke and Millicent Garrett Fawcett” (213). Her analysis of the play in conjunction with the scandalous women of the late nineteenth century is compelling and brings her narrative into line with today’s media coverage of high profile women. Here, at the end of her narrative, Denney returns to Clinton, suggesting that like her nineteenth-century predecessors, “she is able to use the media against itself” (237). At the same time, Denney reminds her readers, “scandalous” women negotiated and continue to negotiate “various and often contradictory identities and motives” (30).