In March 1890, a young woman in mourning dress checked into a Birmingham hotel. She gave her name as the Honourable Helena Ripley. Over a bottle of stout, she told the staff she was the niece of one of the most famous lawyers in England, the cousin of the Duke of Portland, and the sister of a celebrity captain. They believed her.

Her real name was Eleanor Smith. She was twenty-two, the daughter of an Oxfordshire farmer who had lost his land. Some of the names she dropped belonged to real men. None of them had ever heard of her. The brother she invented entirely. The only thing that ever tripped her up was the physical evidence - the clothes she stole and refused to leave behind.

This is her story, told through the records she left behind.