A disappointing read.

As other reviewers have mentioned, it is less the subject of the book, and more the writer's choices, that prove so frustrating. I came away with an appreciation for the lives of Charlotte Cushman, Jane Carlyle, and (to a far lesser degree) Hattie Hosmer, but the author never really manages to make these feel like anything more than three separate stories. Realistically, this is a biography of Cushman—but for some reason, there are two full chapters (and various digressions elsewhere) that focus totally on Carlyle, in a way that almost intrudes on Cushman's life. Yes, the two women are connected, but Julius Markus, the author, never manages to prove why Cushman is "sharing" this narrative with Carlyle as opposed to any one of the other dozen or so women who loved women that appear in the book, many of them with far better claims to a shared spotlight. Hosmer is an even stranger inclusion, introduced early and taking center stage on the book's jacket, but never quite coming in from the periphery of the narrative—she is mentioned often, but usually as a pan-like impish presence at the edges of Cushman's constructed world in Rome.

To add to this, the writer's style is idiosyncratic at best. I appreciated the lengthy endnotes, but as far as I can tell most of the narrative is built up from quotes from letters. That's fine - but it means that much of the time, we are left to draw inference from somewhat "coded" writing from (apparently) one female lover to another. I have no reason to disbelieve Markus' claims, but they're so thin, mostly of the chin-stroking variety that says to the reader, "Isn't it self-evident?" She analyses very little, instead using quotes to enhance or prove the emotions she ascribes to Cushman and her lovers/family/friends/acquaintances. Her tone is often gossipy and dramatic, and a lot of the book reads like a Victorian soap opera: she said ___ in confidence; then he rebuffed her thus ____; then, wounded, she replied ____, and so on. One of her favorite tricks is to repeat part of a sentence, usually from a quoted letter, as a separate impact paragraph for maximum dramatic effect. It appears to "say" something about the repeated line without really saying anything, after all.

Without saying anything, after all. (See?)

I took what I could from the book, but it was a stodgy and slow read for not a lot of meat. You get almost no sense of who these women were as women, only as seen through the lens of their copious romantic affairs and relationships and attempts to manipulate social situations. It's a shallow way to treat women who stood out in their own time. Markus' goal may have been to "discover lives hidden in the shadow," as the subtitle reads, but upon discovering them she has far too little to say beyond, "Look! There they are!" ( )

Would be of interest to those interested in feminist history, or the history of the 19th century American arts and theatre, but maybe not to anyone else. ( )