SOURCE: Holland, Peter. “Not Having It All.” New York Review of Books 42, no. 16 (19 October 1995): 62-4.

In the following review, Holland argues that Mrs. Jordan's Profession: The Story of a Great Actress and a Future King is a “superb” biography, praising Tomalin as an accomplished and “modest writer.”

While staying in Leeds in July 1782, Tate Wilkinson, the successful manager of a theater company touring the north of England, received a message asking him to visit Grace Phillips, an actress who, as Mrs. Francis, had once played Desdemona to his Othello. He found Grace and her three children in dire straits: newly arrived from Ireland and penniless, the family desperately needed work. But Grace Phillips was not asking Wilkinson for a place in his troupe for herself. Instead she proposed that he should employ her daughter Dorothy or, as she preferred to be known, Dora, aged twenty and now five...