Web Content

“You Think Me a Bold Cheat”: Mary Carleton, Counterfeit Princess — The Public Domain Review

Accused of posing as foreign royalty to lure her young suitor into a bigamous marriage, Mary Carleton was the subject of dozens of pamphlets and broadsides published in the mid-17th century, including by Carleton herself. Investigating the fraudster’s life, Laura Kolb finds a self-fashioning figure who both influenced the emergence of the English novel and serves as a strange precursor to our modern-day fascination with conwomen and counterfeits, like the heiress manqué Anna Delvey.