Mrs Jordan was famous as an actress and as a mistress. To most contemporaries this would have seemed a natural combination. Despite the example of the self-conscious rectitude of Mrs Siddons, strict moralist and "Preceptress in English Reading to the Princesses", actresses were not respectable. The title of Claire Tomalin's book thus poses the implicit question as to which was Mrs Jordan's true profession. The text gives a definite answer: the profession was the stage and as an actress Mrs Jordan was a true professional. Had she never become the mistress of the duke of Clarence, later King William IV, we would still know of her, though it is doubtful whether interest in her life would extend beyond historians of the theatre. But as the mistress of a royal prince she was decidedly unprofessional: she used her own income to help maintain the joint menage, loved her prince too well, bore him an extravagant number of children and died abandoned and poor.

Dorothy Jordan's first stage appearance was in Dublin in 1779, when she was 18, and her last was at Margate in 1815, when she was 54. She started at the top in terms of role, if not of venue or salary, playing the lead, as Miss Lucy, in Henry Fielding's The Virgin Unmasked. Soon afterwards she had a success in a daring transvestite version of Sheridan's The Duenna which enabled her, as Claire Tomalin puts it, ". . . to be extraordinary: a perfect girl-boy in her young man's breeches that showed her slim waist and pretty legs". Throughout her career she would play such parts, usually in comedies about marriage: the young girl with the chuckling laugh, the good-natured innocent who turns the tables on worldly wise schemers and, frequently, a man, or a woman who pretends to be a man. That in her fifties and somewhat large she was still playing young women or stuffing herself into knee-breeches and still being applauded is a considerable tribute to her talents.

Parallel to her early stage career went a disastrous private life. She was illegitimate and her father deserted what had, hitherto, been a secure enough home when she was 13. The attentions of a Dublin theatre proprietor, Richard Daly, resulted in the birth of her first child while she was on tour with a north-country company. Scarcely had she established herself on the London stage, than she began to live with Richard Ford, son of one of the proprietors of Drury Lane. She bore him two children but he failed to marry her. Then Prince William, duke of Clarence, the third son of George III came into her life.

Dorothy, or Dora as Claire Tomalin calls her, was at the height of her popularity when she met Clarence. She had come to be to comedy what Mrs Siddons was to tragedy and in prints, engravings and paintings her likeness was everywhere.

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The duke was a bluff and somewhat bumbling naval officer and a previous mistress was rumoured to have left him after being subjected to extended readings from the Lives of the Admirals.

What did she see in him? Claire Tomalin comes to the simple but probably correct conclusion that "she found him loveable".

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For nearly 20 years he seemed to love her too. An official marriage was out of the question though Tomalin, surprisingly, does not raise the possibility of a clandestine marriage which a woman more given to sexual strategy than Dorothy might have secured. They lived, however, as a comfortable and devoted couple enjoying a cosy and very fertile domesticity at Bushy Park near Hampton Court. Despite bearing William ten children, Dorothy was seldom absent from the stage for long. The money was useful, for the duke was always hopelessly in debt, but she needed to be on stage for there she experienced what she described at the end of her life as "an internal exultation" and "delight bordering upon ecstasy".

After so many years of what was virtually a marriage, Dorothy must have felt reasonably secure. Then in 1811 when she was on tour she received a letter from the duke asking her to meet him at Maidenhead to discuss a separation. She went on stage in a part that required her to laugh uncontrollably and wept instead.

That the duke behaved badly, abandoning her when she was most vulnerable at the end of her stage career, is incontrovertible. He did, however, provide for her, with an allowance of ?4,500 a year.

The financial plight and the bailiffs at the door which impelled her to leave England and spend her last months in France were the result of her generosity to her daughters by her previous lovers and in particular to two venal son-in-laws.

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The sons of George III have been portrayed as dedicated philanderers but it is possible to see them as thwarted monogamists, their affectionate unions condemned by the Royal Marriage Act to be illicit or clandestine.

There was a constant temptation to end such unions and make approved marriages which could pay off princely debts and/or provide heirs to the throne. So went the Prince of Wales's Mrs FitzHerbert, the Duke of Kent's Madame St. Laurent and Mrs Jordan.

Claire Tomalin encloses this biography with the peregrinations of a statue of Dorothy and two of her children by Francis Chantrey. William had a rather odd obsession, surrounding himself with the images of the woman he had expelled from his life and in the first year of his reign commissioned a statue of Dorothy. It was denied a place in Westminster Abbey or St Paul's, languished in the country church of one descendant and the garden of the country seat of another and eventually made its way to Buckingham Palace where Dorothy herself was never allowed to enter.

Claire Tomalin could have given us a depressing story of a woman whose life was ruined by impossible men. Instead she has written the biography of a courageous and talented woman.

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A. W. Purdue is senior lecturer in history, Open University.