ABSTRACT
Women's court memoirs of the Regency period could inspire hostile reactions in their early readership, as epitomized by the furore surrounding Lady Charlotte Bury's Diary Illustrative of the Times of George the Fourth on its publication in 1838. The metaphors the authors use to describe the practice of editing implicitly suggest the roles people imagine for themselves in their relationships with texts and readers; an editor of court memoirs can seem like a detective or code-breaker. The Memoirs of Miss C. E. Cary is a work in which disguise is central to the identity of both the author and her subjects. Cary's Memoirs therefore concurs with the sentiment expressed in the opening of Bury's Diary that 'courts are strange, mysterious places', in a narrative that claims to bring to light secret plots surrounding Queen Caroline and Princess Charlotte, only to entangle the reader further in fiction and fact.
