Claire Tomalin's biographies hum with love and anger—an anger civilised and well-researched, and all the more effective for that. Her women's lives were obscured by prudent contemporaries or written out of the record by academics, and we know by now how well she will beat the conspiracy.

She has never found a more appealing subject than Dora Jordan [in Mrs. Jordan's Profession: The Story of a Great Actress and a Future King]. Through the last 20 years of the 18th century, and almost to her death in 1816, Dora was the best-loved comic actress in Britain, with brief intervals of disfavour whipped up by the press. “I find laughing agrees with me better than crying,” she said, talking about a tragic part more suited to Mrs Siddons. She was radiant Comedy to the Siddons' “magnificent and appalling” Tragedy.

Her beauty was in her singing, laughing voice. There are lush portraits by Romney and Beechey, but probably the authentic likenesses are early sketches of her on stage, strong-featured and fast moving. She romped as Little Pickle in farce; was happiest as heroine in boy's clothes or entirely transvestite in Restoration revivals; became “Shakespeare's woman,” in Lamb's tribute, as Rosalind or Viola.

She acted first in Dublin in her teens, and was raped by the theatre-manager, who lent his actresses money and demanded repayment in sex, with prison as alternative. She got pregnant. The abyss was very close, as Tomalin says. But she kept faith in herself and went to Yorkshire, where she had acting relatives.

Here she was lucky to find the necessary platonic mentor, an actor-manager who named her Jordan to mark her new life after crossing the Irish Sea. Soon she was appearing at Drury Lane with Sheridan's company in the winters and touring in the summers. Each great acting style is seen as a return to nature, and Dora's literary intelligence created roles the Romantic poets, like the general public, gave their highest praise: she was “natural,” especially in Shakespeare, though her performances were well thought-out. Sometimes she was quite spontaneous. Hissed by the “precise ladies of Leeds,” who'd heard she was an unmarried mother, she bowed deeply at the end in her britches—with her back to them.

She was never calculating enough to negotiate a wealthy marriage, but lived with a handsome lawyer and had three more children until, exasperated by his reluctance to marry, she left him for Prince William, the third of George III's sons. Though clever, she was not political, and was stunned by the vicious press reaction. A jordan meant a chamberpot, providing easy copy, and a savage, surreal cartoon by Gillray shows William as penis disappearing into a cracked vessel.

When they met he was a yob, but with Dora he changed. Perhaps his loneliness appealed to her maternal side. The obvious mercenary motive can be ruled out, as she was recklessly generous and it was hard to tell which kept which. Together they established the hospitable, gemütlich family life which none of his siblings achieved. They had ten children themselves during, in his own apt phrase “an uninterrupted intercourse of happiness” lasting 20 years. Both were loving and careful parents for all 14 children. Dora lived two full lives, as William's partner and in the theatre. Luckily audiences then could suspend their disbelief even in a pregnant Rosalind.

So nothing explains William's defection, except that he was nearly 50 and began to think he might be king. Once he left her the palace parasites did all the rest. Tomalin makes no attempt to demonise him. The second real monster of the book is his brother the Prince Regent, later George IV. William was simply weak, and inarticulate about her when Dora died in Paris, almost alone and unable to speak the language.

As soon as he was king, he commissioned a life-sized statue by Chantrey, who made a madonna in classical dress with a baby at her breast and an infant at her knee, the mask of Comedy and musical pipes beside her. It was meant for Westminster Abbey but unsurprisingly rejected by the Dean.

Tomalin traces its history until it was presented in 1980 to the Queen, who was “graciously pleased to accept the bequest.” So unlike Dora it went to Buckingham Palace where it “received a Royal welcome,” whatever that may be. Tomalin gets a bit gemütlich herself in the last pages. She likes to think of Dora smiling at the irony of the statue's present setting. I'd rather think her response might be the one she gave the precise ladies of Leeds. Both these whimsies seem inadequate to end the story of so brilliant a woman, humiliated in the dismal royalty-charade.