Aviva Briefel's concise and elegant study is not, as one might expect, about individuals who forged artworks in the nineteenth century and the detection of these crimes. Rather it is about the “rich rhetoric of forgery” that arose in the literature of that period in England, France, and the United States. Briefel sets out to identify the various identities created by this literature and to show how they reflected biases relating to “categories of gender, class, race, and nationality” (2). Forgeries themselves are of interest primarily as “complex and often unreadable sites of identity construction” (184 n. 49).

According to Briefel, the nineteenth century was the golden age of fakery (“forgery” and “fake” are used interchangeably). Old Masters and other prestigious art objects were in high demand by museums and collectors, and forgers were quick to supply not only exact replicas of well-known works but also “newly discovered” creations of renowned artists or anonymous ancients. In chapter 1, “Imperfect Doubles: The Forger and the Copyist,” Briefel examines the gender distinction between “forgers” (male) and “copyists” (female). The forger tended to be an object of “fascinated admiration” (20), even a model of creative enterprise who could attain middle-class respectability. Unscrupulous dealers were often the real villains in the business of fakes. Women were not admitted to this masculine world of deceit and reward, however, and the female copyist, Briefel argues, was honest—often, indeed, a servile imitator—and her craft, unlike the forger’s, was practiced in full view. In Henry James's The American (1877), Noémie Nioche illustrates the extreme visibility of female copyists in the Louvre, as well as their transgressive availability.

Chapter 2, “Intimate Detections: Connoisseurs, Forgers, and the Thing between Them,” explores the similarities between art experts and forgers. Their shared, often secret, knowledge could produce homosocial bonds, disguised by characterizing the forgery as a seductive woman. Furthering these bonds was Giovanni Morelli's method, introduced in 1874, for detecting authorship in artworks by the close analysis of bodily details. The Morelli method would also seem to have democratized connoisseurship by making it into a set of learnable skills, but Briefel demonstrates that shibboleths remained (a good “eye,” the frisson). Oscar Wilde's “The Portrait of Mr. W. H.” (1889) serves as an unusually explicit examination of the role homoeroticism could play in the covert connections between art fraud and expertise.

The hidden connections between restoration and forgery are examined in chapter 3, “Restorations: Cultural Authority and the Life of Objects.” Restoration proves to be an ambiguous and emotional issue in controversies at the National Gallery, London, and the Metropolitan Museum. To further explore the importance of art objects to national prestige, Briefel analyzes Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Marble Faun (1860), where three young artists in Rome represent different attitudes toward restoring (or forging) Italian art objects for Americans.

Briefel turns to the art market itself in chapter 4, “Real Sons of Abraham: Jewish Art-Dealers and the Traffic in Fakes.” Fears about the commodification of art were projected onto dealers, regularly typed as Jewish and “figures of pure difference” (126). Their power to seduce is illustrated in extreme form by Svengali, the maestro in George du Maurier's Trilby (1894). The Paris of three young British artists is seen as grounded in inauthenticity: they succeed only insofar as they imitate and fabricate (though is it not more plausible simply to see these apprentice artists as imitative and derivative?). But Briefel focuses on the “rhetoric of forgery” in the novel, especially in descriptions of Trilby; thus, her manipulative manager, Svengali, is seen as a dealer in fakes.

Chapter 5, “Paste and Pearls,” explores the only way women were permitted an active role in material deception: the wearing of fake jewelry. Briefel shows how jewelry was used as an identity marker in short stories by Guy de Maupassant and Henry James, where moral character, especially in the “bric-a-brac woman,” is established by jewelry, both real and fake. The book concludes with the analysis of two films with fakery as their theme. In George Cukor's Gaslight (1944), a husband frames his wife as a kleptomaniac in order to obtain a cache of jewels. The wife, in Briefel's view, becomes a forger herself by confessing to the crimes, as forgers are wont to do. In F for Fake (1974), Orson Wells explores the magical power of radio and film to deceive, even structuring the film itself as an exercise in deception.

Briefel begins and ends her study with the portrait of Dorian Gray, not exactly a forgery or fake but certainly a clear example of how persons and art objects interconnect in the matter of identity. In this study, fakery is defined so broadly that it seems at times to include all that is artificial, imitative, or derivative. Interpretation is occasionally forced, as when Briefel suggests that, because of its narrative structure, The Marble Faun “becomes something of a fake itself” (115). Trilby is seen as a virtual treatise on fakery. Briefel goes so far as to suggest that, in the wake of the novel's extraordinary financial success, George du Maurier feared he was turning into “something of a Jew himself” (143). Despite such occasional overreaching, however, The Deceivers presents many original ideas on the complexities of fakery and identity, as well as an authoritative overview of previous scholarship. The text is enriched with a number of black and white illustrations from contemporaneous publications. Briefel's writing is as lively and humorous as that from Punch, making this book a pleasure to read.