Counterfeit Ladies: The Life and Death of Mary Frith the Case of Mary Carleton

by Janet Todd, Elizabeth Spearing

Overview

Accused of transvestism and trickery, indicted for bigamy and hanged for robbery, Mary Carleton, the German Princess, was the most notorious female rogue of her time. Mary Frith, alias Mal Cutpurse, was a similarly spectacular transgressor: a resident of London's infamous Alsatia district, a criminal sanctuary between Fleet Street and the Thames, she was renowned for strolling the streets of seventeenth-century London in men's clothes.
The Case of Mary Carleton and The Life and Death of Mary Frith, are reprinted here for the first time, since their original publication in 1663 and 1662 respectively. In the tradition of Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders, these are the semi-fictional biographies of these two extraordinary criminals. They reveal to us a world in which women smoked in taverns, drank to excess in alehouses, and regaled revelers with anecdotes around a fire—all perilous activities for a woman in a society which considered modesty, silence, and obedience the feminine virtues of the day.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780814782149
Publisher:	New York University Press
Publication date:	01/01/1995
Series:	Essential Papers on Psychoanalysis , #8
Pages:	232
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.52(d)

About the Author

Janet Todd's most recent book is Mary Wollstonecraft. She is Professor of English at the University of East Anglia.

Elizabeth Spearing is currently completing her doctorate on seventeenth-century writing.

Editorial Reviews

Mary Frith, a procurer and fence known as Mal Cutpurse, and Mary Carleton, indicted for bigamy, are the subjects of the first two female criminal autobiographies. The 17th century women caught the public's imagination, becoming historical and mythical figures who chafed at the restrictions imposed on women of their times. Their stories were first published a year apart in the 1660s, before the time when a Romantic interest in the self turned autobiography into a familiar literary form. Includes extensive notes and two appendices: a table of dates for Mal Cutpurse and the Mary Carleton pamphlets. No index. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

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