Misfortune

Title: Misfortune
Author: Wesley Stace
Published: 2006 by Vintage (orig. 2005)
Genre: Historical drama
Pages: 519 + appendix




The SO and I went on a trip to London and Cardiff two months ago, and before we left, her cousin recommended to us this book shop called Gay's the Word, with books pertaining to the non-hetero persuasion from wall to wall. I highly recommend the place. I was on a budget so I had given myself permission to buy two books, no more. Just two. I easily found twenty interesting ones. But no, only two. This was one, and I admit, I picked it up just before the till (and discarded a book I had already chosen after much consideration), just because of the cover. I don't think I even read the back until a while later, sitting outside a pub, having a pint. Ah, London... that particular pint was a questionable one, though.


Anyway. Misfortune is the story of Rose Loveall and her unconventional family, set in England during the 19th century. Abandoned as a newborn into a heap of trash, Rose is rescued by the richest man in England, so far unmarried and, frankly, quite uninterested. He decides to make her his heir, the new Lady Loveall. Despite the fact that the baby has a very obvious thorn, he names her Rose Old after his dead but beloved sister Dolores.


(It seriously took me 250 pages. 250 pages. To realise that Rose Old is an anagram of Dolores. I'd figured that Rose does indeed come from Dolores, minus a few letters, but "Rose Old? Why Rose Old? She's just a baby...?" I am not a smart woman.)


Rose grows wanting nothing, a happy little kid with no idea that most girls don't have what she has between her legs. But years tend to make those differences clear, and greedy relatives will not hesitate to use such things to make trouble.


I put Historical drama as genre, but there's a lot of humour and warmth in the book, and I found myself grinning and giggling like mad more than shedding tears, even though there were a few of those as well.Mr. Stace's writing has a hypnotic tone, it carries the reader with it, and Rose is a most generous narrator. And the cover? It's of course a picture of her, in her pretty dress and lovely moustache and tiny beard.




   I read in my mother's diary that a joke circulated even then that I had been born a male but that my parents had so hoped to have a girl. And those villagers were a superstitious lot, no strangers to dressing a son in a girl's nightgown to protect him from harm and hide him from bad fairies: old wives told that such a boy would grow up to fascinate all the girls. And it was common knowledge that girls don't grow feminine till their mother's milk is out of them, so perhaps they wondered whether I was still at the teat. But people will talk, and it was all dismissed as unkind. It is astounding what effect the confidence of weath can have upon the general consensus. No one stood up and declared that I had no clothes - perhaps they had barely noticed - so I was the best-dressed yound lady in the kingdom.