As an English professor, I rarely have the pleasure of reviewing visually stunning books, so my assessment of this book as lovely to look at does not rest on the basis of much comparison. The three essays that form the text, the plentiful (and lush) illustrations, and the lengthy chronology of Siddons’s life contained in this volume make up a fascinating picture of Siddons’s career and its alchemy with eighteenth-century portraiture. Siddons’s stage roles are only one factor in what the authors-Asleson, Shearer West, Shelley Bennett, and Mark Leonard-discuss as the production of Siddons’s image as star and cultural icon. What emerges is what one might call the eighteenth-century studies version of the modern field of star studies, with a heavy emphasis on portraiture as the form that the authors see as most important to the production of Siddons’s image. Asleson begins with a six-page chronology that starts with Siddons’s birth in 1755 and ends with Bette Davis portraying Siddons in a tableau vivant at the 1957 Pageant of the Masters in Irvine, California. What emerges most forcefully from this list of dated events are the career vicissitudes of the legendary actor, vicissitudes that tend to fall into two categories:...