This chapter focuses on the problems of authorship that hover around The Memoirs of a Lady of Quality, an autobiographical text embedded in Tobias Smollett’s Adventures of Peregrine Pickle (1751), and how these debates have served as a proxy for critics’ different accounts of the relation between gender and form. I demonstrate how the notorious aristocrat Lady Vane uses her scandalous memoir to voice her real marital complaints within Smollett’s novel, which despite a predominating misogyny, endorses her bid to rewrite her fallen public character as a literary one. As seen in chapter one, the idea that a woman’s speech could play a determinative role in conferring social legitimacy is treated as a conjectural privilege exercisable only in fiction. The resistant reading I offer here highlights the undeniable limitations of how Smollett and his text think about gender, while finding room for modern readers to re-engage meaningfully with both texts, novel and tale. Discovery of the first standalone publication of Memoirs, as a sumptuous art book with erotic illustrations by Véra Willoughby in 1925, demonstrates the radical feminist and queer potentiality of the text and its embedded form.