beggarwoman

Begging an Answer: Kleist's The Beggarwoman of Locarno.

And it was in the romantic remains of the Shrewsbury estate we stumbled across sense-scrambling attraction Hex - based on the local legend of an old oak tree cursed by a beggarwoman.

In this story, protagonist Alina Reyes, a bored, bourgeoise, young engaged woman in Buenos Aires begins to dream and eventually be taken over by an abused beggarwoman in snowy Budapest, "un ser insolito con vivencias radicalmente opuestas a las suyas que terminara aliendandola totalmente.

As Annabel Patterson asserts, "Cade is an impostor, a traitor of his class, hawking his false claims to the name of Mortimer by way of a romantic fiction, the tale of a noble child stolen from its cradle by a beggarwoman, and now returned to claim its inheritance.

The scene is redolent of the two cousins' own horror at being accosted in public by "my cousin's own little Judy from Menlo," a Galway beggarwoman persistent in her distant and embarrassing kinship to Miss Martin.