Neil McKenna

London theatres were notorious for their seedy reputations, but the events of 28 April 1870 were shocking even by the standards of the West End. As the audience filed out of the Strand Theatre, two garishly-dressed ‘ladies’ were arrested by police officers, who accused them of being men in drag. Carried off to Bow Street police station, the women were revealed in due course to be Ernest Boulton (known as Stella) and Frederick William Park (known as Fanny). McKenna’s book unfolds the story of their extraordinary trial for indecency and delves into the secret gay underworld of 19th-century London. It’s a fine story, but its historical credentials are undermined by a relentlessly salacious tone and by McKenna’s fondness for floridly narrative, unsubstantiated assertions...

For the full review, please see my blog:
https://theidlewoman.net/2018/04/25/fanny-and-stella-neil-mckenna/… (meer)

So. This is exactly the biography of Oscar Wilde I would write if I were to uh, write one. It focuses on the important questions like, "Whom did he have sex with, maybe?" and "Whom did his friends have sex with, maybe?" No matter if in answering these questions he uses the most questionable sources, for example Trelawny Backhouse, who in addition to claiming all sorts of salacious things about Oscar Wilde and Bosie also claimed to have had sex with the Empress of China. Frankly, if there was anything, anything that had to do with Oscar Wilde and homosexuality and I was writing a book on Oscar Wilde and homosexuality, I would go ALL OUT, too and just put everything I could find in there. If I found out that some guy had sent letters to Oscar and later Oscar had dinner with him then I am writing that, yeah, maybe they had sex, okay? All in the effort to answer the biggest, most important question: "Just how much of a flaming queen was Oscar Wilde?" because the answer is girl, the man was OSCAR WILDE, you could make up all sorts of shit and it wouldn't come close.… (meer)

In the right hands, this could have been a fascinating work of history, but while the blurb for Fanny and Stella states that it's "meticulously researched and dazzlingly written", for me it failed on both counts. McKenna has clearly read widely on the trial at the heart of this book and on Victorian England, but it's not clear that he's read deeply on it; not only does he fail to follow some interesting lines of inquiry and contextualisation which are only hinted at here, he also frequently and infuriatingly commits the cardinal sin of the popular historian, speculating wildly and giving that speculation as well-grounded fact. I lost count of the number of times I rolled my eyes at McKenna telling us what one person thought about another, what another person felt during sex, what emotions ran through an entire crowd—there is no way for him to know any of these things! If you want to write fiction, write fiction, and the style of the prose here does indicate that McKenna's tempted in that direction. While the purple prose may have been a deliberate affectation, a parody of Victoriana, it's one which is deeply wearying after several pages. There's enough drama inherent in the central story without any additional baroque flourishes: Frederick 'Fanny' Park, a judge’s son, and Ernest 'Stella' Boulton, two middle-class transvestite prostitutes who consorted with labourers and lords and whose arrest on the charge of enticing others to commit sodomy transfixed England in 1870. Diverting enough to read to the end, but not to be recommended as a work of history.… (meer)