Book Description

The true crime story of a master swindler and charming con-artist who became one of the most notorious female criminals of the Victorian Age. ‘The story of Mrs. Gordon Baillie is stranger than anything to be met with in the field of fiction.’ Mrs. Gordon Baillie, known throughout her life as Annie, was born in the direst poverty in the small Scottish fishing town of Peterhead in 1848. Illegitimate and illiterate, her beauty and intelligence nevertheless enabled her to overcome her circumstances and become a charming and wealthy socialite living a life of luxury while raising money for worthy causes and charitable works. Behind her supposed perfect and contented life, however, lay one of the most notorious and compulsive swindlers of the Victorian Age. Her fraudulent fundraising and larger-than-life schemes played out across four decades and three continents, and involved land owners, crofters, aristocrats, politicians, bankers, socialist revolutionaries, operatic stars, and the cultural icons of the day. She became mistress to a rich aristocrat, married a world-renowned male opera singer and later took as a lover a vicar’s son with anarchist tendencies. For most of her ‘career’ she kept one step ahead of the law and her nemesis, Inspector Henry Marshall of Scotland Yard, but finally becoming undone through her own compulsion for petty theft, despite her amassed fortune. During her life she used more than forty aliases, produced four children and spent her way through millions in ill-gotten wealth. But at the turn of the twentieth century, her notoriety was such that she took refuge in America and disappeared from history. “If you want to read about a Victorian woman who was able to hide her humble origins in Scotland to become one of the most notorious con-women in well-to-do society—an audacious figure who tried to live the life she felt she deserved rather than the one society wanted her to lead—then this book is highly recommended.” —Criminal Historian, Dr Nell Darby