Betina Entzminger traces the development of the bad belle from nineteenth-century domestic novelist E.D.E.N. Southworth to contemporary novelist Kaye Gibbons. Coy and alluring like the traditional southern belle, the bad belle is also manipulative and knowing. By making the patriarch vulnerable to women who outwardly conform to the limiting conventions of womanhood but inwardly break all the rules, these writers challenged a society that stereotyped black women as promiscuous and forced white women onto pedestals while committing heinous acts in their name.

THE BELLE GONE BAD shows that even writers who have been critically dismissed as too domestic or conservative to be innovative did challenge southern institutions and conceptions about race, class, and gender. What united the dangerous belles created by several generations of women writing in the South, old and new, is their liberating potential.