Lord Loveall, heretofore heirless lord of the sprawling Love Hall, is the richest man in England. He arrives home one morning with the most unusual package - a baby that he presents as the inheritor to the family name and fortune. In honour of his beloved sister, who died young, Loveall names the baby Rose. The household, relieved at the continuation of the Loveall line, ignores the fact that this Rose has a thorn...that she is, in fact, a boy.
Rose grows up with the two servant children who are her only friends, blissfully unaware of her own gender, casually hitting boundaries at Love Hall's yearly cricket game and learning to shave as she continues to wear more and more elaborate dresses. Until, of course, the fateful day when Rose's world comes crashing down around her, and she is banished from Love Hall as an impostor by those who would claim her place as heir.
MISFORTUNE by Wesley Stace
Published: 2005
Genre: Gothic Fiction, Phycological Fiction
My rating: 3.5 stars ⭐
This was certainly an interesting book to read during Pride Month. The cover and the concept intrigued me, knowing an unusual exploration of gender and sexuality was inevitable within its pages - a foundling, discovered by a wealthy Lord, raised as a girl at his behest. The child knowing no different except for the sense of having a secret she doesn't understand.
Had this been a modern day setting, I would find it unconvincing that any child could go through the earlier years of life without discovering the "obvious" difference between girls/boys in some way or another. However, being set in the 1800s, this is entirely plausible. Heading into the Victorian era, gender was strictly confined to boxes. Women were expected to be pure in both appearance and behaviour, whilst men were expected to appear "manly" - facial hair for example, began to be considered a strong sign of manhood, and those without were often not viewed as "man enough". Knowing this I found it interesting that Rose is depicted with a moustache on the cover of the book.
There's a certain chapter after Rose's gender reveal in Misfortune, where she struggles to determine her place and fit into one box or another. She's a boy that feels like a girl and this she explains by describing the impracticalities of wardrobe in relational to each gender. Men's clothing being too tight and revealing in comparison to the billowing skirts worn by women in the 1800s that better concealed her anatomy, and not supportive enough in other places in comparison to corsets. Just a single struggle and adjustment amongst many.
What follows is a naturally confused journey of self discovery and identity that I felt turned this book to a coming of age story to a certain degree. Most of the book is narrated by Rose herself, though it intermittently switches to her adoptive mother's journal entries, which she relies upon to check her version of events has been remembered correctly. She herself admits that her recollection of things will be forever differentiated in her mind as 'before' and 'after' with no obvious timeline along the way.
I enjoyed many aspects of this book, however, I did feel that there were certain moments that were rushed though and others that could have been condensed. The ending, for example, was too convenient for my liking, and the section of the book I disliked the most.
Part 1 of the book (approximately 71 pages) was arguably my favourite section, archiving how Rose came into Lord Loveall's charge from a 'voice of god' narrative. I loved the young character of Pharaoh and eagerly awaited a reappearance for the rest of the book.
Overall, I felt this was a complex, engaging gothic fiction, exploring transvestism, sexual repression, and social repression and so much more!
Let me know if you've read, or plan on reading this book!
Happy reading,
Zuzu 🖋
