You know when you've eaten a lot of sweet stuff you crave for something salty, and vice versa? Well, I do, anyway. And I do the same with books. Lately I seem to have been reading a few rather lightweight novels -- Adele Geras' delightful teen novel Happy Endings, a historical novel, My Lady of Cleves, the Austen spin-off, The Darcys and the Bingleys, and a couple of Agatha Christies, only one of which I blogged about. Admittedly I also managed an enthrallingly serious novel, Sebastian Barry's The Secret Scripture, which I am delighted to say has made its way from the Booker long list to the short list since I wrote. But I was feeling in need of something rather weightier, and have now just embarked on a past Booker winner, Peter Carey's True History of the Kelly Gang, which I will write about soon. This is my second Carey book, and my first, Oscar and Lucinda, also won the Booker. I loved that one and am getting drawn into this one too. Meanwhile I have also just finished a non-fiction book which I am willing to bet not many of you will have heard of. Betty Bennett's Mary Diana Dods, A Gentleman and a Scholar, was published in 1991. Bennett, who died in 2006, was a most distinguished American scholar, whose most famous work was undoubtedly her three volume edition of the Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, the editing of which occupied her for about fifteen years. It was while she was preparing the first volume that she encountered the extraordinary figure who is the subject of this book. Initially Bennett thought she would easily trace the two men, David Lyndsay and Walter Sholto Douglas, whose names cropped up in Mary Shelley's letters -- she anticipated them appearing a a couple of one-line footnotes. To her astonishment, after a prolonged period of preliminary research, she discovered that neither of them actually existed. Both were pseudonyms used by a woman, Mary Diana Dods, whose own life proved to be so fascinating that Bennett ended up on an extraordinary trail of literary detective work which took her to Harvard, to London, to Paris, to Scotland and else where and occupied her, on and off, for about ten years. Doddy, as her friends knew her, turned out to have been one of the two illegitimate daughters of a wealthy Scottish earl, who raised and educated them and then seems to have failed to support them properly thereafter. One sister, married and then widowed, with two small boys, seems to have depended on her cleverer sister for financial support, so Doddy turned to writing and had a small measure of success, at least at first. In itself this is not particularly surprising, nor is her use of male pseudonyms at that period (we are talking about the 1820s here). What is much more amazing is the fact that she began, soon afterwards, to dress as a man, and formed a partnership with a young woman whose baby was generally taken to be hers. The two of them, aided and abetted by Mary Shelley (who obtained fake passports for them), went to live in Paris, where, astonishingly, they managed to carry off this deception for a number of years despite mixing in lively French society. Evidently the "marriage" deteriorated rather rapidly and Doddy's "wife" had affairs with several Frenchmen. As for poor Doddy, she ended up in a debtor's prison, where she sent out for false whiskers to deceive her jailers. Where and when she died is not recorded. Well! What a story. But what fascinated me as much as the facts that were uncovered was the story of how Bennett so singlemindedly pursued this research over years and over continents. What fun, and what dedication! Having done a bit of this sort of thing myself, I was envious and sympathetic at the same time. Of course, not being a novel, this book leaves a number of loose ends, not least of which is the question of Doddy's sexuality. Was she a lesbian? We do not know. Wonderful stuff.