Fanny and Stella tells the story of two young men in the Victoria era, named Frederick Park and Ernest Boulton, who shocked the moral sensibilities of Victorian England when they were discovered at the theatre dressed as the young ladies Fanny and Stella.
By Patrick Cash
Carted immediately off to jail, they were charged with the fairly serious crime of sodomy and their case became a veritable cause célèbre in every stratosphere of the state, especially when it began to emerge that their tangled web of transvestism and pederasty might extend into the very aristocracy themselves.
What author Neil McKenna skilfully creates in his text is not just a dry, historical retelling of this riotous, rollicking story, but an interweaving of his own fictional projections into the minds of his two cross-dressing protagonists. Though it may annoy the factual purists and means that Fanny & Stella can’t exactly be used as a dissertation-cited tome, this historic-fiction hybrid makes for a colourfully involving read.
Occasionally McKenna gets carried away with his own invention – ‘she so frequently spat out small balls of fire and brimstone in the general direction of Fanny and Stella that those two young gentlemen must surely have felt themselves fortunate not to go up in flames like the citizens of Sodom & Gomorrah’ – but for the most part the language is inveigling, lively and almost gleefully lusty in places – ‘it was clear, crystal clear, that Harry Park was up to his elbows in this sodomitic conspiracy.’
Perhaps one of the most frequent ideas to present itself, in my reading at least, is the social madness that meant the ‘powers that be’ should take such strange, obsessive interest in the sex lives of others. And why should it matter to a judge if a young man wants to dress in women’s clothes, or not? As we see that the passing of time has proved this thinking, in a way, a truth and declared that neither drag nor sodomy will herald the destruction of society as we know it, it becomes all the more absorbing – especially in a curved parallel to the current Russian situation – as to how this case rather broke the waves. A great read, highly recommended.
Fanny & Stella is available to buy from Gay’s the Word Bookshop, 66 Marchmont Street, WC1N 1AB.
