Becoming Frauds

Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s fiction challenged conventional assumptions about the feminine and spoke to women’s growing discontent with their limited roles as daughters, wives, and mothers. Her novels suggest how a number of women became frauds, in the sense of using deception, inventing false identities, and committing crimes in order to meet conventional society’s expectations for the proper female. Braddon’s female frauds subverted dominant Victorian ideology’s representation of women as domestic ideals by defying the impractical and impossible role of “angel” and rejecting gender and class-based discrimination.