Some years ago, I stumbled on Australian newspaper references to a woman who attempted land resettlement schemes in the latter part of the 19th Century in places like Tasmania, on Flinders Island and at Wilson’s Promontory in Victoria, for Scottish families from the Isle of Skye who were displaced as a result of the notorious clearances. Going by the sobriquet of “The Crofters’ Friend”, she gained the trust of many individuals in high office but was ultimately proved to be a confidence trickster.

Always fascinated by the sheer hutzpah of such individuals, I started researching her story for my blog The History Bucket on lesser-known or unusual women from history. However, she was such a chaotic and complicated character, having numerous intrigues, aliases, international residences, husbands, mystery co-conspirators - and with children or descendants untraceable via the usual genealogy sites - that it all proved to be a herculean task to try and condense down into a few blog pages.

So, imagine my initial delight to discover this book that might finally have unravelled the riddle that was the outrageous Mrs Gordon Baillie, or Mary Ann Bruce Sutherland.

Although she would change her surname multiple times, she always kept the first name of Annie. There is reasonable evidence that she had been born in Peterhead, Scotland, in 1848, the illegitimate daughter of Kate Reid, a servant, and possibly farmer, John Newbond. It is not known for certain when she died, but most likely in penury in New York in the early 1900s.

Annie didn’t really get going with her outrageous career of crime and deceit until her twenties. She developed various systems for receiving goods and services for free or wheedling cash out of kind people and then dodging them when they came calling for repayment. She was clearly a natural actress, determined to use her considerable feminine charms to rise above her lowly and tough origins, inventing aristocratic lineages and forging important upper-class and political connections to steer her passage through life. She could barely read and write and craftily employed others to cover her limitations. Men fell for her like skittles but cannier women often saw through her ploys. She was a neglectful mother and used her children as pawns, eventually abandoning them to their fates. The fact all four of them completely disappear from history makes it apparent they changed their identities after her shenanigans became well-known.

Was it something about her shoddy upbringing that left her without a normal conscience or moral anchor? She had no compulsion in twisting the truth or playing the victim when it suited her. As a record of Annie’s chequered career, the work is accomplished, but with its reliance on long-winded verbatim replication of court cases from petty exploitation of shop assistants and cab drivers through to aristocrats and heads of church and state, plus extracts of dubious newspaper articles and excitable or unreliable memoirs from years after the events, it is a disappointing litany of facts that fails as a page-turner, being repetitive and just plain dull in places. A professional psychologist's opinion might have made it more interesting in getting a handle on this woman – that’s if one ever could.

Curiously, there is neither an index nor any authors’ acknowledgement of sources and so it is apparent that the bulk of the information is cobbled together from archival newspapers or journals, trials, parish records and genealogy records – the majority of which are available via free and/or subscription services on the internet. In the end, I was disappointed that I didn’t really discover that much more about Annie than my own initial research had revealed.
 
Two-and-a-half stars

amazon.com

amazon.co.uk

Booktopia

​Like its title, this novel has been almost forgotten on my shelves, possibly because this small paperback Orion edition has a tight spine and very small print and I kept discarding it in favour of something easier to read. (I’d be interested in any research by publishers/readers into the overall success of books that are comfortable to handle and read in relationship to size, font, etc.)

Zach, divorced father of one, writer/artist, and owner of an art gallery in Bath, is an aficionado of the work of Charles Aubrey, a well-known painter from the 1930s. Rumours that Zach may have a family connection to him adds to the intrigue around his past. He travels to the Dorset village where the Aubrey family spent many summer holidays. There, he is surprised to encounter an elderly woman who features in some of Aubrey’s drawings. This is Dimity/Mitzy, an eccentric recluse who slowly reveals her story that is intertwined with Zach’s curiosity about puzzling aspects of Aubrey’s works and his growing relationship with Hannah, a local farmer.

This is a slow boil of a novel. I nearly gave up a few times until the pace gathered as the disparate mystery threads came together in the last third. Some characters were more interesting than others, such as Charles’s mistress, the French Moroccan, Celeste, but others less so. Charles had too much of the cliched erratic tortured womanising artist about him. I wasn’t convinced by Zach’s attraction to the bristly and untidy Hannah, nor the practical aspects in how Dimity managed to keep her secret for sixty odd years.

Three stars.
 
(As this title was published in 2012, it could be out of print. It may be available through your library or second-hand sources.)

Amazon.co.uk (audio)

Booktopia