Carrying All Before Her is, in the words of Chelsea Phillips, “the first full length study to address pregnancy as a specific and significant phenomenon in its own right” (6). This timely study concentrates exclusively on actresses and stretches across the entirety of the long eighteenth century. It is carefully structured, elegantly written, and meticulously researched, relying on a range of primary sources, including Phillips’ impressive knowledge of eighteenth-century plays, roles, and casts.The case studies that Phillips presents are of Susannah Mountfort-Verbruggen, Anne Oldfield, Susannah Cibber, George Anne Bellamy, Sarah Siddons, and Dorothy Jordan. Startlingly, the introduction opens with an account of twenty-first-century producers who, regardless of losing revenue and frustrating audiences on whom their future revenue depended, and despite having booked an able substitute who was ready to perform, sacked cast and crew and closed a Broadway show when the star fell pregnant. These producers tried (for years) to claim insurance on the grounds of accident, before giving up the fight. This sorry tale raises a question that Phillips revisits throughout her fascinating book and answers in the conclusion. What might such employers learn from eighteenth-century theatre managers, who had no such insurance? Perhaps the efficiency with which managers and their staff collaborated to keep the theatre solvent and running for themselves as well as for demanding, demonstrative audiences is one reason that the many pregnancies among eighteenth-century actresses have attracted little scholarly attention. After all, from the Restoration on, female performers became exceptionally important members of the theatrical workplace, a position often reflected in the high salaries that the most popular were able to command.Phillips gives examples of David Garrick’s, John Rich’s, Tate Wilkinson’s, and Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s accommodations of pregnant stars that prompt further study of what she describes as “the systemic impact of pregnancy . . . on repertory planning and managerial practices” (33). She makes their principles clear. In order that actresses could perform for as long as possible and return after an expected lying-in period (with paid leave) of up to eight weeks, the repertoire, the demands of the plays, and the casting were adjusted. By looking to the welfare of pregnant actresses, managers were honoring the eighteenth-century expectation that mothers should provide for their children and reflecting the interests and concerns of the many women in their nightly audiences, who were well aware of the dangers of childbirth. Making the case that audiences also seemed to require pregnant actresses to be in stable relationships, the focus of Phillip’s feminist history of these early actresses is on their agency as they aimed to maintain their careers and the public intimacy of celebrity together with a private life that could avoid or escape public vilification.Phillips employs Mikhail Bakhtin’s concepts of the “grotesque” and the “classical” to describe what the gravid body can communicate from the stage. The first chapter pairs Mountfort-Verbruggen, a shape-shifting comedienne, and Oldfield, who inherited many of Mountfort-Verbruggen’s roles but was to make her name playing tragic parts. Mountfort-Verbruggen worked long into her pregnancies, arguably too long, as she died at the age of thirty-seven after giving birth to her son by her second husband, the actor Jack Verbruggen. She also returned promptly to the stage when her first husband, the actor and playwright William Mountfort, was mistaken for Anne Bracegirdle’s lover and murdered by one of Bracegirdle’s fans. Mountfort-Verbruggen had one child every spring for three years with Mountfort (who wrote roles for her), and Phillips suggests that these summer engenderings were planned to accommodate the nausea and discomfort of early pregnancy before the London theatres reopened in the early autumn. Building on a description from Colley Cibber, Phillips argues that, in playing a range of vulgar, bawdy characters, Mountfort Verbruggen found her bump to be an additional comic prop. This makes perfect sense as an actress must manage whatever physical condition she is experiencing onstage and might as well play up its advantages. Perhaps more surprising is that, without apparent censure, Mountfort-Verbruggen also played romantic heroines and breeches roles while pregnant. This shows, as Phillips does throughout her book, that audiences valued commitment to entertainment and capacity to entertain over appearance. They could look past an actual body to its fictional role but might be less forgiving of drama in a performer’s life.Phillips argues that, when her first partner, Arthur Maynwaring, a Whig MP, died, it was by continuing to work and convey the containment and self-control of faithful heroines that Oldfield contested and eventually overcame rumors that she had destroyed him through sexual excess and infected him with venereal disease. In 1712, at Drury Lane, she was the first to play Andromache, Hector’s widow, in Ambrose Philips’ adaption from Racine, The Distrest Mother, and continued to play throughout her second pregnancy by Maynwaring. If, as Phillips contends, pregnancy adds an emotive layer of engagement between performer and audiences, Oldfield maximized it and made Andromache standard casting for gravid actresses. In 1713, she returned to the stage and the role two weeks after Maynwaring’s death, visibly carrying his child. Following the stage tragedy, which, nevertheless, leaves Andromache triumphant, Oldfield delivered as “herself” Eustace Budgell’s sassy epilogue, fusing Andromache’s drama with her own loss. According to a contemporary, she came onstage accompanied by her and Maynwaring’s three-year-old son. With or without the little boy, this must have been a powerful moment. Oldfield, always an independent woman with her own household, seems to have gained respect for protecting this boy’s inheritance by not marrying her second partner, Charles Churchill, MP, by whom she later had a child.In chapter 2, Phillips describes how Susannah Cibber and Bellamy’s “transparent” acting styles—seeming to expose their real passions—appealed to the fashionable theory of “sensibility.” She also proposes that pregnancy onstage was less a signifier of sex than a mark of maternity. Notwithstanding, Cibber and Bellamy were targeted for abandoning a first stable partner for a second, taking embryos with them. Cibber’s career had benefited from marriage into an influential theatrical family, but, as Phillips observes, her husband treated her as shabbily as he had his first wife, Jane Johnson, another popular actress. No doubt, Cibber could draw on her conjugal experience and the audience’s sympathy for a wronged wife when, in 1739, pregnant either by her husband or by William Sloper (the wealthier man to whom he had let her out), she played to the fashionable appreciation of a female victim onstage. Phillips coins the term tenebrism to describe Cibber’s probable acting style, which was to give the public the impression of transparency by turning a full beam on emotions so powerful as to hide all compromising information, such as the fact that William Sloper was also married with children. Perhaps Cibber manipulated and managed her career as expertly offstage as she did on. Garrick spoke of her tenacious demands as a celebrated employee, and Phillips regards her withdrawal from the stage in 1749 as a strategy to hide her pregnancy by Sloper.George Anne Bellamy is another intriguing case study—and an appropriate inclusion, not least because, after a twenty-five-year stage career, she wrote a memoir in the character of a wiser woman. Bellamy was hired as competition for Susannah Cibber and was just as popular for playing vulnerable heroines. In 1749, James Quin had to explain from the stage how Cibber’s life had mimicked her art when she eloped with George Metham during a performance of The Provoked Wife. Her abscondment seems only to have boosted audience fascination, and she continued to be a sought-after theatrical commodity in what looked like a stable life partnership. However, she was decried three years later when, abandoning the supportive Metham to live with the caddish John Calcraft, she also abandoned her children. Bellamy’s An Apology for the Life of George Anne Bellamy (1785) aims to explain and exonerate her errors and also recounts her experience of pregnancy. While giving birth, Bellamy was attended by one of the first medical, male midwives, John Ford, who was also a male midwife to royalty. This novel, elite practice extended the celebrity that she had enjoyed onstage into her mainly absent motherhood.Much has been written about Sarah Siddons. However, Phillip’s chapter about her is unique in exploring reactions to and the management of her pregnancies while she was working during the years 1785–94. She was already pregnant in 1775 when she was first engaged at Drury Lane, where she debuted as a comedienne shortly after giving birth. Her voice was considered inadequate, and she returned to the theatre that had employed her in Bath. There, her final performance was as Andromache, followed by a presentation of her three children as her three reasons to accept a new contract and a better salary at Drury Lane. This visual excuse acknowledged her professional duty to her audience, which was trumped only by her duty as a mother and wife. At Drury Lane she became an icon of selfless motherhood and repeatedly, with adjustments to her costly costumes, performed tragic maternity into her third trimester. She was also a model of professional duty and on one occasion agreed to bring her shows forward to the theatre season’s opening so that they could go on before she withdrew to give birth. Her roles included Lady Macbeth, which, with the character’s violence and sickness counterpointing the gravid body, is as powerful a pregnancy part as Andromache. By contrast, she also played, while pregnant, the tenacious virgin Isabella in Measure for Measure. How audiences overlooked the evidence of a celebrity’s body is suggested by Phillips’ inclusion (as black-and-white reproductions) of Joshua Reynolds’ massive portrait of Siddons as the Tragic Muse and George Henry Harlow’s haunting image of her as Lady Macbeth.The final chapter, on Dorothea Jordan, includes, along with John Hoppner’s graceful portrait of Jordan as the Comic Muse, some of the many visual comments on her life and on the Duke of Clarence, whose mistress she became when she left Richard Ford. Jordan had what people accepted as a marriage with Ford, with whom she had two children and accommodated a previous illegitimate child. This appearance of respectability supported the early, almost instant fame that her fusions of joyous self with the merry characters she played earned her in performance. Jordan, pregnant at least eighteen times in the course of her long career, had ten surviving babies by Clarence and worked constantly to support them. She even lent Clarence a large amount of money. Apart from keeping her solvent and in the public eye, commitment to her art and her public combated scurrilous comment about her private life and absence from her first daughter and Ford’s children. It also showed commitment to Britain at a time when childbearing had been established as a woman’s patriotic duty.Carrying All Before Her is a timely call to reconsider our assumptions about pregnancy—historical and current—and its impact on professional performers. An unexpected benefit is a helpful appendix that lists the dates of births and christenings of all the known children of the actresses covered. Pregnancy, childbirth, and the negotiation of a career in acting are still poorly understood, and Phillips’ fascinating book is an important contribution that takes us back to the very beginnings of female acting.