Performing Menken: Adah Isaacs Menken and the Birth of American Celebrity. By Renée M. Sentilles. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003; pp. 313. $45 cloth.; Sarah Bernhardt's First American Theatrical Tour, 1880–1881. By Patricia Marks. Jefferson, NC, and London: McFarland, 2003; pp. 222. $35 paper.

In two compelling new books, each analyzing a sensational female star whose career peaked in the late nineteenth century, the multifaceted celebrity image becomes the historical prism refracting the social, political, and cultural dynamics of various performance contexts. Neither study purports to chronicle the star's entire life and document truths about “who she really was.” Rather, each focuses on a relatively brief, temporally circumscribed period of the performer's career and examines her complex public personae and their meanings to her American audiences. Ultimately, more is revealed about the values of those who consumed and exploited the star than about the star herself. The two celebrities at issue here, Adah Isaacs Menken and Sarah Bernhardt, separated in time by a generation, compare in intriguing ways, both as historical agents and as subjects of historiographical analysis.