Confessions of the Fox by Jordy Rosenberg
The most famed thieves, jailbreakers, and lovers in eighteenth-century London were Jack Sheppard and Edgeworth Bess. But nobody is aware of the full story, and their confessions have never been discovered.
Before now. After experiencing heartbreak, a researcher by the name of Dr Voth finds a long-lost manuscript that contains a gender-bent exposé of Jack and Bess’s exploits. Confessions of the Fox: An Autobiography: Is it real or a fraud? It becomes evident that their fates are connected as Dr Voth is lured more into Jack and Bess’s story of subterranean resistance and gender metamorphosis. Only a miracle can save them all.
Jordy Rosenberg is a bold storyteller of exceptional talent who writes with the narrative skill of Sarah Waters and the mischievous imagination of Nabokov.
Confessions of the Fox by Jordy Rosenberg
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An old manuscript that looks to be a real, insider account of the life of infamous early 18th-century robber and jailbreaker Jack Sheppard is found by a recently dumped, depressed gender studies professor. That text is “Confessions of the Fox,” along with the professor’s copious, rambling footnotes.
It’s appropriate to make a little interjection at this point to stress that, on the surface, this book is incredibly intelligent and engaging. It is surprising that non-white queers are so prevalent in this beautiful story and that Jack is reinvented as a trans man. Additionally, to my knowledge, this is the only piece of recent mainstream literature written by a transgender author. That makes it a tiny miracle in my opinion.
If history and classic literature—from Chaucer to Dickens and beyond—were our only guides, we may conclude that cis-white heterosexuals have always made up the majority of London’s population. However, the city has always been quite diverse, something the chroniclers may have recognized if they had looked beyond their white Anglo-Saxon noses.
This is a story about rebellion; Jack and his molly Bess (reimagined as a South Asian) battle the plague and an invading police state as they plot to overthrow their oppressors; meanwhile, in the parallel narrative, Professor Voth takes increasingly drastic measures to thwart disgusting university administrators and publishers intent on appropriating his work, all the while preserving and annotating Jack’s story.
