Margaret Catchpole

MC was a late eighteenth-century labouring-class woman whose extraordinary experience as a transported felon propelled her (through the influence of Elizabeth Cobbold , her employer and an active woman writer) to express herself in letters, of which eleven are extant. A copy of her confession also survives. These writings, as well as her life-story, were thoroughly appropriated by a nineteenth-century novelistic version. Even recent and sophisticated commentators have found it hard to separate her voice from still-continuing ventriloquism.