ABSTRACT
Early modern female rogues exert a fascination today as they did once over their contemporaries. While Mary Frith (1584–1659), better known as Moll Cutpurse, was the inspiration for Middleton and Dekker’s The Roaring Girl of 1611, another highwaywoman, Catherine Ferrars (c.1634–1660), has been the subject of two film versions of The Wicked Lady, with Margaret Lockwood and Faye Dunaway playing the title role. Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders, whose heroine is a fictitious composite of real-life female rogues, still enjoys great popularity. It is not surprising therefore that early modern criminal biography has provided fertile ground for examining why criminals were fictionalized by popular writers to serve the needs of an avid readership. Lincoln Faller voices this interest: ‘our concern is not so much with the real as with the highly selective ways in which the real was represented’. He argues that criminal biography was absorbed into two principal myths of crime, one imitating the picaresque novel, the other a form of spiritual biography found especially in cases of domestic murder. In the latter myth the personality of the accused was given detailed attention and every effort was taken to create a real world, ‘even to the extent of inventing what would otherwise seem to be actual facts’. Conversely, Faller argues, criminal picaresque narratives such as The English Gusman, a biography of the highwayman James Hind, ‘move toward the fantastic, edging away from a “solid” and “realistic” appraisal’ of the lives of the criminals described. By suppressing the personality of individual criminals and turning them into roguish stereotypes, Faller argues that reality was distorted to serve as an escape for readers from the concerns of the everyday world, ‘not the least of which was the increasingly troublesome business of hanging men merely for crimes against property’. 1 It is to this category of criminal biography that accounts of the petty thieves and tricksters, Jenny Voss and Mary Carleton, belong.
