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Originally Posted by medard
Here's a review from Kathryn Hughes in The Guardian with some pictures.
Now, Oscar Wilde had a secret life? I didn't know that. So what did he do in his secret life? Oh.. Nevermind.. Maybe I don't want to know actually. |
Judging from that review
Fanny and Stella: The Young Men Who Shocked Victorian England appears to inhabit a gray area between fiction and non-fiction. That is based on a true story but well padded with speculation and/or made up stuff.
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"Extrapolate" is the key word here, though. For letters, no matter how intimate and fine-grained, rarely tell the biographer the thing he longs to know: the moment his subject sighed, or felt a lurch in his guts, or longed to be somewhere else entirely. And, although McKenna scrupulously uses the sources when he's got them, at those points where the archive runs out he allows his imagination to take over. Using free indirect speech he ventriloquises Stella and Fanny's inner worlds, creating a camp stream of consciousness in which the two young men think and function as lascivious women.
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Well rum, sodomy, and the lash it should be an interesting and topical [for Americans] read.