The conclusion brings together the argument of expatriate social mobility with the historiography of British imperial benefits and costs, advancing the case for expatriate influences on British social structure. It links this larger account to the complexities of upward mobility abroad, underlining the tensions incurred for Edgar especially, and, with reference to Lambert and Lester’s work on ‘imperial careering’, notes the relevance of the book to the history of emotions, establishing the connection between imperial history and love. It stresses the ways in which the love story was shaped by expatriate life, with relevance to the history of heterosexuality, and to the concept of companionate marriage between the wars. The Wilsons return in England was bound up with their expatriate identity, coloured by nostalgia, but for Edgar an idealisation of domestic settlement, contrasting with Winifred’s father’s adherence to an expatriate masculinity preoccupied with global wanderlust. The succeeding generation of this mobile ‘expatriate clan’ followed their parents’ mobile habits but gradually returned to England, adopting Edgar’s model of the domestic ideal, enhanced by the prosperity and social status generated by Edgar, Winifred and William’s expatriate ventures, illustrating the power of expatriate social mobility.

Winifred Cooper’s birth as a middle-class expatriate followed parental decisions to embark on challenging mobile employment and adventure. However, the chapter shows how expatriate opportunities worked for young girls in unique, gendered ways. The expatriate social mobility argument here takes a more complex turn, charting a growing girl’s ability to exploit frequent travel and greater freedoms of privileged life abroad. Her education and social life shifted frequently between sites in Georgia, London and Tehran, and later Ahwaz, fostering a degree of maturity and linguistic ability. Her engagement with local politics and multicultural friends in Georgia, her work as a telegraphist, her popularity as a multilingual and fashionable ‘young lady’ at the Persian court and among Tehran expatriates, and management of successive hopeful suitors, underline the potential of expatriation to enable women’s independence and cosmopolitanism. Told mostly through a diary and letters, it ends with a compelling account of Winifred and Edgar’s early love story and a fashionable expatriate wedding in Tehran. It moves from two unknown English men, prospering in overseas service, to a complex dynamic of how expatriate identity could be exploited by the next generation and contribute to an unconventional, cosmopolitan marriage.

Questions to do with women can seem to have little significance in Molière’s theatre. However, some emerge from the array of apparently interchangeable female characters, just as some plays treat topics concerning women that were then being discussed amongst the educated members of polite society. Thus, as regards education, L’École des femmes speaks out against the limited and restrictive teaching of the time – especially in convent schools. Equally, some of the plays point up the anxiety of some young women who believed they were regarded as the prey in a hunt, together with the demeaning process by which many were married off, while others posit the possibility of pleasurable and companionable marriage. The plays also treat the position of independent women, either the apparently self-supporting female characters of La Critique de l’École des femmes, or widows like Célimène in Le Misanthrope. Molière’s works make use of a narrow range of women and are in no sense radical as far as they are concerned. But they mock and deflate male attempts to shape women’s lives or to control their identity, and might be said to demand freedom and self-determination for them.