Debbie Lee. Romantic Liars: Obscure Women who became Impostors and Challenged an Empire. New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. ISBN: 0312294581. Price: $75.

Scholars and critics of literary forgery and fakery have lately turned their attention to investigating the world of impostors – Michael Keevak, for example, has written suggestively on the eighteenth-century Formosan, George Psalmanazar, in The Pretended Asian (2004). The Romantic period has no shortage of such characters, and figures such as the radical prophetess Joanna Southcott, Princess Caraboo (Mary Baker), and even John Hatfield (as Alexander Augustus Hope, seducer of the Maid of Buttermere) hold an enduring interest. All three feature in Debbie Lee’s Romantic Liars, alongside several unjustly neglected cases: the cross-dressing sailor Mary Anne Talbot / John Taylor, Ann Moore the fasting woman, Mary Bateman the Witch of Leeds, and Sir Thomas Stamford Bingley Raffles. In presenting such diverse material, Lee skilfully weaves together biography and cultural history to bring out the social implications of imposture: why is the impostor a transgressive figure? why do they become celebrities? what function do they serve? She is not afraid to confront questions of identity, but admirably resists the temptation to produce over-sophisticated readings of Romantic subjectivity. This is an immensely readable study: there is no better guide to Romantic impostors than Debbie Lee’s fascinating and forthright book. Almost all of Lee’s impostors are women who disguised themselves to create social opportunities, which they lacked through gender and class prejudice. Disguise – in many different guises – gave the chance of upward mobility, money, and independence. In other words, although impostors are in one sense mythic types (the trickster tradition is as old as Western literature), imposture is a particularly viable role for impoverished labouring class or rural women. It allows them to cross social borders. This adaptability not only challenges cultural myths of power, but perhaps more importantly is a way of reclaiming story-telling, of narrating the self. Imposture read in this way is a language (or rather, a performative symptom) of female psychological trauma. Mary Anne Talbot, for example, was forced into a masculine identity by her guardian (Capt. Essex Bowen). On his death, she remained a male, passing as a French soldier (“playing both the gender boundary and the national one,” 4). As John Taylor, s/he was given up to the British navy, then captured by the French, and spent 18 months imprisoned. Going back to the British navy, Talbot/Taylor served on a merchantman carrying, appropriately enough, textiles (“fabric made fabrication possible,” 5), and was promoted to a commission. In a bizarre twist, s/he was then press-ganged while on leave in London and obliged to reveal her sex to secure her release. She determined to settle down as a woman – training herself to feminine behaviour – but without success. Talbot/Taylor reverted to a masculine identity and consequently a life of beggary. By now, s/he was a sort of celebrity. Talbot/Taylor discovered that a potted account of his/her life had been printed, and then discovered another woman who claimed to be Mary Anne Talbot and John Taylor: “She had so effectively internalized her dual selves, male and female, that they formed a single character that was compelling, and surprisingly stable, enough to be the subject of identity theft” (9). Despite this, s/he continued a downward spiral until being rescued by the printer Robert Kirby (publisher of Kirby’s Wonderful and Scientific Museum, 1802-20), who employed Talbot/Taylor as a domestic servant. Kirby published his/her memoir after she died – a life that itself has since been hotly disputed as a hoax or delusion itself – a hoax of a hoax. How many li(v)es are there here? Talbot/Taylor’s self-reinvention looks decidedly modest beside that of the prophetess Joanna Southcott. …