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Showing posts with the label cross-dressing

Current read: My Lady Notorious by Jo Beverley

He had found his damsel in distress, but it wasn't sweet Verity. It was the difficult, angry, beautiful Charles. At this point in the story, the heroine, disguised as a man, has kidnapped the hero, who has seen through her disguise but decided not to embarrass her by revealing that he knows she is a woman. I have always enjoyed reading cross-dressing historical novels, although I am fully aware of the difficulties of successfully disguising either sex as the other. However, there are plenty of true stories about the subject, mostly about women who chose to dress and act like men and got away with it. Sometimes these real cross-dressers may have been transgendered (of both physical sexes) and in some cases they were women who chafed at the restrictions put upon them by a patriarchal society, but the most common stories are of women following their men to war and dressing as men to avoid being sent home or becoming the victims of sexual violence. However, writers, and especially roma...

Bibliophile reviews These Old Shades

Author: Georgette Heyer Year published: 1926 Genre: Historical novel Sub-genre(s): Romance The Story: The devilish, rakish Duke of Avon rescues Léonie, a young woman disguised as a boy, from the streets of Paris, thus winning her everlasting love and adoration. His reasons are at first purely selfish, as he recognises in her the tell-tale family appearance of his worst enemy, and he believes he can use her to exact revenge. But before long, he begins to really care for her, and his mission of revenge begins to revolve around getting justice for Léonie, who has been wronged by her family. Review: I really hate it when people dismiss Georgette Heyer as a “mere” writer of romance novels (their wording, not mine). Sure, she did write some that were pure romance (and very good they are too, Venetia for example), but mostly they tended to be humorous historicals about adventures and mishaps where people also happened to fall in love (often apparently as an afterthought by Heyer), whil...