"Examining the "bad belle" as a recurring character, The Belle Gone Bad finds that white southern women writers from the antebellum period to the present have used treacherous belles to subtly indict their culture from within. Combining the southern ideal of ladyhood with the sexual power of the dark seductress, the bad belle is the perfect figure with which to critique a culture that effectively enslaved both its white and black women.".

"Betina Entzminger traces the development of the bad belle from nineteenth-century domestic novelist E.D.E.N. Southworth to contemporary novelist Kaye Gibbons." "Representations of the bad belle evolved along with southern society, and by the late twentieth century, many women writers expressed emancipation through the literal or figurative destruction of corrupt or would-be belles.".

"The Belle Gone Bad shows that even writers who have been dismissed as too domestic or conservative to be innovative did - through the strategy of the bad belle character - challenge southern institutions and conceptions about race, class, and gender."--BOOK JACKET.