‘Two men, so dissimilar’: Class, Marriage and Masculinity in George Moore’s Albert Nobbs (1918) and Simone Benmussa’s The Singular Life of Albert Nobbs (1977)

This chapter examines a critically overlooked literary fiction by an Irish writer whose legacy has tended to be overshadowed by the modernist generation which succeeded him. George Moore’s Albert Nobbs depicts the lives of not one but two female-bodied men working in a Dublin hotel in the 1860s. It provides an alternative origin for a literary history of transgender representation, with an emphasis on lived experience and social reality rather than the historical fantasy of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, published ten years later. This chapter aims to articulate the ‘transgender capacity’ (David Getsy, 2014) of Moore’s novella, exploring the insights it offers into the social and economic functions of gender. Simone Benmussa’s 1977 stage adaptation, The Singular Life of Albert Nobbs, has been canonised as a classic of feminist theatre; reflection on its critical reception reveals the ways in which transgender motifs have been interpreted in Second Wave feminist contexts.

Blue Births and Last Words: Rewriting Race, Nation and Family in Jackie Kay’s Trumpet (1998)

Posthumous exposure, often on the grounds of medical examination, has acted as the problematic vehicle through which a number of transgender lives have been bequeathed to history, with the perceived disparity between sex and gender serving as a pretext to forcibly rewrite the transgender person’s identity in public memory. Inspired by the life story of American jazz musician, Billy Tipton (1914-1989), Jackie Kay’s novel Trumpet explores the aftermath of posthumous exposure but is notable for its purposeful thwarting of the narrative dynamics which conventionally accompany it. This chapter will explore how its focus on a Scottish musician of African heritage and his relationship with his adopted mixed-race son questions the privileging of essentialising narratives of ‘birth’, including those to do with gender, nation, race and family.

‘She had never been a woman’: Second Wave Feminism, Femininity and Transgender in Angela Carter’s The Passion of New Eve (1977)

This chapter focuses on a novel by a writer whose reputation as one of the most innovative and influential authors of the late twentieth century is firmly established. The centrality of Angela Carter’s work to feminist literary culture is widely recognised and celebrated, as is her passionately combative engagement with the feminist orthodoxies of her time. Through a focus on the contrasting depictions of an involuntary transsexual, the eponymous Eve (who is subject to sex reassignment surgery without her consent), and an elective transgender person, Tristessa (who is refused medical treatment despite living as woman), this chapter aims to address the critical legacies of specific strands of Second Wave feminist critique. It does so by situating the novel within the context of debates and controversies about the place of male-to-female transsexuals in the women’s movement contemporary to the era of its writing and reception.

Transgender and the Literary Imagination: Changing Gender in Twentieth-Century Writing

Drawing on the insights of leading scholars in the field of transgender studies, the Introduction provides extended consideration of critical and cultural frameworks essential for the project of rereading representations of transgender in twentieth-century literary fiction, including: transgender historiography; feminism and queer theory; LGBT activism and identity politics. More specifically, it examines the following topics: questions of historical representation in relation to historical fiction; the influence of genres of transgender life writing, including memoir and biography; the legacies of Second Wave feminist critiques of transsexuals; the impact of narratives of gender crossing on the interpretation of transgender lives; the relationship between transsexual narratives and intersex bodies; the role of colonial contexts and discourses of ‘race’ in the construction of gender normativity. It concludes with an overview of the book structure, providing summaries of each chapter.

Two Beings/One Body: Intersex Lives and Transsexual Narratives in Man into Woman (1931) and David Ebershoff’s The Danish Girl (2000)

This chapter examines David Ebershoff’s novel The Danish Girl, a historical fiction based on the life of Lili Elbe (1882–1931), reputed to be one of the first people to undergo gender reassignment treatment. Genres of life writing have played a prominent role in the representation of transgender lives; the relationship between historical record, autobiography and historical fiction is complicated by the possibility that Elbe may have been an intersex person. This chapter examines the extent to which conventions of transsexual life writing obscure narratives of intersex existence, investigating the novel’s relationship to a formative source text, a generically hybrid auto/biography. The implications of the novel’s reliance on the binary categories of identity prevalent in Man into Woman will be explored in relation to categories of sex, gender (especially femininity) and sexuality (specifically male homosexuality).

Playing the Breeches Part: Feminist Appropriations, Biographical Fictions and Colonial Contexts in Patricia Duncker’s James Miranda Barry (1999)

This chapter examines a fictional reconstruction of the life of the Irish-born and Scottish-educated colonial military surgeon James Miranda Barry (c. 1799–1865), whose memory has been irrevocably shaped by reports that he was discovered after death to be female bodied. It argues that the feminist narrative of strategic gender crossing which characterises most versions of Barry’s life emerges in displaced form in the novel; in this way, Barry’s transgender (or intersex) identity serves as a vehicle through which women can express agency and pursue ambition in vicarious fashion. Barry’s career took place in the theatre of empire but the racial politics of this era of British history are often overlooked in both biographical and fictional accounts of Barry’s life; close attention to the treatment of colonial contexts will serve to demonstrate the role of white privilege and the construction of racial ‘others’ in these narratives.

Never an Unhappy Hour: Revisiting Marriage in Film Adaptations of Albert Nobbs (2011) and The Danish Girl (2016)

Released in a period in which the rights and representation of transgender people were attaining an unprecedented visibility in the mainstream media and popular culture, the film adaptations examined in this chapter offer sympathetic portraits of their subjects but demonstrate an uneven engagement with contemporary understandings of transgender identity. The significant expansion of Hubert Page’s character in the 2011 adaptation of George Moore’s Albert Nobbs (1918), achieved through the vehicle of marriage, implicitly validates his masculinity. By contrast, the protracted demise of the marriage between Einar Wegener and Gerda Gottlieb occupies the dramatic centre of the 2016 adaptation of David Ebershoff’s novel The Danish Girl (2000), rather than Lili Elbe’s premature death. The prominence of marriage within these film adaptations of twentieth-century texts will be considered in the context of contemporary debates about LGBT activism and neoliberal politics.