Magdalen King-Hall published Lift and Death of the Wicked Lady Skelton in 1944, as a historical noyel set in the late 17th century, and typical of its kind. It tells the stirring tale of beautiful Barbara who marries at 16, when 'Something wild and innocent in her cried out in panic, "No, this can never be my fate! Escape before it is too late!"' and, bored by five years' aristocratic life, often at night - 'stripped off her Indian gown and silk nightdress, smiling down at her beautiful naked body, before clothing herself in man's attire.... the over-large belt girded round her elegant waist, her wide-brimmed hat set jauntily on her head ... the curious nostrils poised * you might almost say! - for flight.' - and takes to ruthlessly robbing coaches as a highwayman on Watling Street, eventually committing remorseless murders and dying from a sword-thrust unwittingly delivered to her by her lover.
A preliminary Author's Note states that the novel is founded on a Hertfordshire tradition 'that there was once a seventeenth-century lady of quality who took to the Road, and subsequently haunted the family mansion'.
This is the legend of Lady Katherine Ferrers, born in Bayford in 1634 into a family of Hertfordshire landowners, married at 14 into the family owning Ware Park, and reputed to have played the highwayman around Markyate and Wheathampstead until she was shot, riding home to die on the steps of her family home in Markyate, then haunting the scene of her death.
This new edition of the book, though, comes with scholarly introduction and notes by Rowland Hughes, dismissing all allegations of such behaviour by Lady Ferrers. Hughes sees the significance of the novel chiefly as feminist, being published in the 1940s when 'women were testing the boundaries of their prescribed gender roles'. He suggests, 'Barbara's rebellious, subversive exploits, her rejection of the pre-ordained path that a patriarchal society has laid out for her, had a vicarious appeal for women readers in particular' - including her cross-dressing. Hughes concludes, 'For all of her narcissism and self-interest, I would argue that it is Barbara's willingness to embrace and relish her sexual power that lies at the heart of her - and hence the novel's - appeal'. Narcissism and self-interest are hardly the worst of her faults - she becomes a truly cruel criminal.)
So a novel which on publication in 7944 sought to present a legend in a society two hundred years earlier comes, sixty years later, to have its allegedly historical source debunked, and its chief significance taken to be the context of the period of its publication.