"An excellent piece of film history, brilliantly researched and eloquently narrated, Damsels and Divas Sheds new light on well-known figures, while bringing less familiar stars back into the spotlight. It engages with some of the most exciting scholarship about 1920s American cinema, the study of celebrity and representations of the female body, ethnicity and Europeanness."
~Andrew Higson, co-editor of Film Europe and Film America
"Written with engaging clarity and scholarly vigour and founded on first-class archival research, Damsels and Divas is a hugely welcome addition to scholarship on Hollywood stardom in the 1920s. The book shines much-needed light on the extraordinary careers of European female stars Pola Negri, Vilma Bánky and Jetta Goudal as well as the discourses of ethnicity, gender and class that shaped the firmament in which they, as Frymus puts it, ‘shone briefly, but very brightly’."
~Michael Williams, author of Film Stardom and the Ancient Past
~Lights, Camera, Author!
"An engaging writing style [and a] varied and highly accessible choice of artefacts for analysis."
~Early Popular Visual Culture
"The immense amount of archival research Frymus has undertaken is evident throughout, along with the wonderful accompanying images, such as film stills, postcards, magazine articles and full-page colour photographs of magazine covers. Moreover, the vast range of notes supplementing each chapter is also impressive. A fascinating review study of similar but different European stars who worked during Hollywood’s early years and is a welcome addition to the ever-expanding work on film stars and extrafilmic material."
~Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television
"Damsels and Divas ranks with the work of Richard Dyer and Jeanine Basinger as a valuable star study. Highly recommended."
~Choice
"Damsels and Divas carves out a space next to Paula Marantz Cohen’s Silent Stars and the Triumph of the American Myth (2001) in regard to silent era stardom and its relationship to the national imaginary."
~Quarterly Review of Film and Video
