Confessions of the Fox

I have never read anything quite like this book. Rosenberg takes the story of the folk hero Jack Sheppard and re-imagines it as the tale of a trans man who first escapes indenture then becomes a hero to the people after a daring escape from prison. He falls in love with Bess Khan, who has fled tragedy in the fenlands to become a revolutionary in eighteenth-century London.

Rosenberg also ingeniously uses footnotes to create the unforgettable character of Professor Voth, who begins by investigating the rediscovered manuscript of Sheppard’s story and ends up telling his own story as well. 

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I read this book early in my exploration of genderqueer identity, and I found Professor Voth’s defiant joy in uncovering and sharing the historical story of Jack Sheppard, and in his own trans identity, permission-giving. This playful book dramatizes the search for trans histories and ancestries, ultimately transforming this search into a celebration of chosen family.

As a historian, I love well-researched historical fiction. Imagine my surprise when a lover handed me Confessions of the Fox. This book offers a historical reimagining of the life and times of 18th-century English thief Jack Sheppard, who, in Rosenberg’s estimation, was a transgender man. Confessions is also a commentary on queer historical practice. Periodic footnotes offer meta observations by a modern-day trans academic who has apparently “discovered” Sheppard’s lost text. This is a fun and stirring book on many levels—a revisionist work of “what if” history, a page-turning working-class queer love story, and an intervention in transgender historiography.

This book has several mind-benders in it, and I love it. There is a historical manuscript that an academic in the near-future has to verify for authenticity. The manuscript is from the 1700s about a transperson named Jack Sheppard, and his adventures in London. But the footnotes from the near-future academic and their advisors reveal a threat that ultimately cause them to flee. This novel bends and stretches and changes, all the while keeping one narrative in 1724 with the incredible slang of Jack Sheppard, and the other narrative and its meta-revelations stuck (almost always) in the footnotes. By then… show more.

Jordy’s astonishing page-turner is so much more than the ‘zingy romp’ its cover blurb claims for it (though it is also pretty ‘zingy’). Where to start? A beleaguered academic finds a manuscript showing that eighteenth-century London super-thief Jack Sheppard was a trans man embroiled in an attempt to acquire an early preparation of testosterone. At once a bitter satire on the crushing of academic freedom by university management’s turn to corporate capitalism, an attack on the ruthless brutality of Big Pharma, a meditation on the problematics attending historical research, a clarion call for trans voices to be heard on their… show more.