William Klaber

This is a fictionalized biography of a quite remarkable but little-known 19th-century figure, Lucy Ann Lobdell, a woman who lived most of her adult life as a man.

Born in 1829 in upstate New York, Lucy learned from her father to hunt and to play the violin, both unusual activities for a female at that time. She did marry, but after the marriage failed, and she had a young daughter to support, her life started to veer off in unexpected directions. Leaving her daughter with her parents, Lucy left home dressed as a man, taking the name Joseph Israel Lobdell, setting out to make enough money that she could send for her daughter and make a life for them together.

She never lived with her daughter again.

As Joseph Lobdell, she started a school of music and dance in a Pennsylvania town. While quite successful for a time, she was eventually discovered, and had to flee on very short notice.

But by this time she'd discovered she liked being a man.

There's much that's hard to understand about Lucy/Joseph's identity and life, because the nineteenth century didn't have the concepts and vocabulary to adequately describe or discuss people who did not fit easily into existing gender roles. It seems quite likely that she, or he, was a transgender man, at a time when there was no possibility of society understanding and accepting her/him as that. While Lucy/Joseph's life is in some senses very well documented, it gives us very little understanding of the inner person, and no really coherent story.

This novel is an excellent effort at supplying that coherent story, and a possible understanding of who Lucy/Joseph was to him/herself. Her further adventures, in the Minnesota Territory and the early years of the state of Minnesota, then in New York again where she meets Marie Perry, and their subsequent life together is by turns fascinating and painful.

In a day when marriage equality and gender equity have made enormous progress, and the rights of transgender individuals have some protection even though not being fully accepted yet, this is an enlightening look at what life was like in earlier times for those who did not and could not fit the approved mold.

Highly recommended.

I received a free electronic galley of this book from the publisher via NetGalley.… (mehr)

Sigh. Not a full 3, maybe 2.75. I had to go back and re-read the end and the supplementals last night because I thought my unsettled feeling may have been a result of the wine I was drinking. It wasn't. After the time in the first part of the book where she had her dancing school, followed by the trip west, I just did not feel especially engaged with Lucy/Joe. The author just did not present it in a way that continued to click for me. I didn't believe that Lucy/Joe came across as a true case of gender misassignment, rather that she was accidentally transgendered by circumstance and her desire to make a better life for her daughter. I was more shocked than I probably should have been by the degree to which she was pursued as a criminal instead of being left to herself. Her treatment as a mental patient was sadly not surprising, and in this area, the transgenderism was not the only thing at work - she clearly experienced PTSD from her experience out west. A better resolution of her relationship with her daughter would have made for a more satisfying novel, since in the end this is not a work of non-fiction, and the end did have a very rushed feel to it. This really had the potential to be more.

Edit the next day. I forgot to mention that I was a little worried that the transgenderism would not come across as distinct from her mental health issues and lend credence to less informed readers that transgenderism is in fact a mental illness.… (mehr)