A beautiful woman, but I think that's a small ironic smile. Maybe my knowledge of whom - and what - she was makes me see something that's not there, but no matter what, this photo of Violet Charlesworth (1884-some time after 1912) strikes me as a nominator of smartness, irony and the special pride known as arrogance. However, other people would most likely have felt a certain shame at being and doing what she was and did, but that I see nothing of in her portrait: She loved to fake whatever she set her mind to fake, including her own biography, her character - and her non-existing wealth.

She was an Englishwoman with a proclaimed love for Scotland, (which may have been a pretence!). For several years she defrauded people to believe that she was a very wealthy heiress who would soon inherit a substantial fortune. That was absolutely not true, but people believed her and her fabricated identity as a woman of a good, rich family. Why? Well, she was pretty and charming. Also, she appeared to be of a certain social standing. The reason for this pretence was to obtain loans and favors from those who were what she claimed to be, namely rich.

Many people must have been shocked when it was reputed that she had died in a freak car accident, when she and her car fell off a cliff and were swept away by the sea. However, some didn't believe in this quite convenient accident that sort of blotted her and her loans out - or so she thought. As her body was nowhere to be found, and there were no trustworthy witnesses, an investigation was started, and soon she was found for real, alive and probably thriving, in Scotland. In 1910 both she and her mother were charged with obtaining money under false pretences, and they were sentenced to five years of prison, but strangely enough after some time the sentence was reduced to three years. When she was released in 1912 she went back to Scotland, but from then on all traces of her and her life have been missing. Weird? Yeah, but also very interesting because it can't have been all that easy to make herself "invisible" as her trial had made her quite famous, both within and outside of Britain.