The first full-length account of the master swindler and charming
con-artist Mrs Gordon Baillie 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 40 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.
