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Debbie Lee was driving through the Devonshire countryside one
muggy July day on the 200-year-old trail of a mysterious
Englishwoman. She was tracking the wanton daughter of a local
cobbler, a woman who had donned the identity of an exotic princess
and conned her way into the company of the aristocracy.
Lee's adventure had begun a few months before, when she found an
intriguing footnote about an identity theft in a book by Samuel
Taylor Coleridge. A salesman had fooled Coleridge and an entire
community into believing he was an English gentleman. Intrigued by
the story, Lee, an associate professor of English at Washington
State University, turned her find into a paper, which she presented
at a conference in Canada. When an editor approached her and asked
if she was working on a book, she said, "Sure. Yeah, it's going to
be a book." Lee admits now that she had simply acted on
opportunity.
Those few words led to a grant proposal, a book deal to write
Romantic Liars, and a large cash advance—enough to bankroll a
lengthy stay in England for Lee to hunt out her stories. What Lee
didn’t realize at the time was that she, a teacher, scholar, wife,
and mother, would be taking on the new roles of hunter, sleuth, and
historian; and that, following in the footsteps of her
subjects—among them a Javanese princess, a sailor, and a
witch—living where they lived, eating where they ate, she would
slip out of her own identity and into theirs to better understand
them. Nor did she realize the toll that moving between countries,
living among strangers, and pursuing what were often the unhappy
pasts of her subjects would take.
That July day in Devonshire, the village of Witheridge looked to
her like something out of a fairytale, with its quaint stone
buildings and thatched roofs. But what was more on her mind, as she
drove into the village, was how she could win over the locals. She
stopped at a pub in the hope that someone there could offer some
details about Mary Baker, a woman born into the community in 1791.
What she did know was that Mary was pretty, dark-haired, and
petite, with a cunning ability to tell tales.
The folks at the Angel pub knew all about Mary, telling Lee that
she was somewhat of a local celebrity. They urged her to seek out
the town historians who lived close by.
Moments later, she was sharing tea with the historians, an older
couple, and listening as they imparted details about the town,
noting that the members of Mary’s family had been craftsmen, and
that Mary as a child had been boyish and willful. Yes, Lee thought,
she already liked this woman.
The historians showed her to their garage, a room stuffed
floor-to-ceiling with boxes of diaries, papers, deeds, marriage
certificates, and firsthand histories of the community. A village
had existed in the area of Witheridge from prehistoric times, and
for thousands of years the landscape had been dotted with
farmhouses of mud walls and thatched roofs. It was not a wealthy
place. In Mary’s day, the village had had a bakery, which is still
standing, a few pubs and inns, a stone church, and a large market
square. For a girl with aspirations, life there must have been
frustrating.
Digging into the piles of boxes, the historians handed Lee her
first great find, an aged, hand-written document detailing Mary’s
family history and her early years in the village before she became
the famous Caraboo, a princess from “Javasu” who had escaped from
pirate captors.
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