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It’s hot as fuck, said the friend who handed me Confessions of the Fox, a faux-memoir set in eighteenth-century London I was a little sceptical After all, this was Jordy Rosenberg’s first novel A queer theorist and historian of this period, he has re-written an eighteenth-century life from a trans perspective – a fool’s errand, murmured the cynic in me, to claim a world dominated by heteropatriarchy Yet I found that as well as being hot as fuck, it was also something of a masterpiece   The novel poses as a lost manuscript, authored by an outlaw named Jack Sheppard, and only recently discovered by an academic Sheppard was once a popular hero: a celebrity thief, famous for picking the pockets of the rich Born into poverty in 1702, Jack was sent to the workhouse at six to become a cane-chair maker, and by and by, became a brilliant carpenter But he remained trapped in a system of exploitative labour, indentured by merchants until he rebelled, becoming a thief and, when he got caught, a jail-breaker After a series of fantastic escapes from the law, he was publicly executed, aged 22 Even in his own lifetime, Jack was fast transfigured into fiction At his hanging, a pseudo-memoir was sold among the crowd Soon afterwards, his life was dramatised in plays and operas, with casts that included his great love, Edgeworth Bess, and his nemesis, Jonathan Wild – creating a rich body of literature to which Rosenberg refers as ‘Sheppardiana’   In Rosenberg’s version, the bones of the old story remain, but there’s a gender difference: Jack is not a cis-man In an early chapter, we meet Jack at the age of ten, then assigned female He hates the ‘girl textiles’ he’s forced to wear: organza and lace By night, he picks the locks of his leg-cuffs, ritualistically clanked shut by his master, and sneaks off to the taverns of Drury Lane, where he passes as a boy, and where he’s free It’s during these escapades that Jack meets Bess, a sex worker and an anarchist, who incites him to escape his master and