Cross dressing is an old and familiar plot trope in romance. We’ve talked about it here before, and there’s a pretty thorough list at AAR of all the cross dressing romances they’ve cataloged.
I joke (A LOT) about how oddly easy it is for heroines to easily pass as boys. So many romance heroines years past puberty have grabbed some boys clothing, possibly from a well-hipped stable lad, I presume, and shoved a cap on their heads and presto! Everyone thinks she’s a boy.
Yet there is an amazing history of “passing women,” women who “passed” as men, often marrying other women and living publicly as males, even practicing male professions such as medicine. Cross-dressing was a favorite plot device of many a writer, including Shakespeare.
NB: I may be incorrect in my terminology here. I *thought* “passing women” referred to women who lived outwardly as men, but I’m also finding references to individuals who “passed” as another race. I’m referring here to gender and if I’m using the wrong term, I apologize.
There are several accounts of “passing women” whose stories are jaw dropping. Murray Hall was a politician who voted long before women had the right to do so, and was not revealed to be a female until after Hall died of untreated breast cancer. Hall refused treatment because his gender would have been revealed. James Barry was a British military surgeon whose gender was also not discovered until after his death in 1865. And musician Billy Tipton was similarly revealed to be female upon his death in 1989.
I’ve been thinking about the history of women who passed as men – and how dangerous it was for them – as I’ve been writing up questions for the book club chat for Darlene Marshall’s Sea Change. The heroine, Charlotte, is passing as a male and practicing medicine on a ship as ‘Charley.’ She’s described frequently as not very curvy, with a square jaw and somewhat plain face, but she also takes very careful steps to hide her secondary sex characteristics: she binds her breasts, for example, and she tries not to be seen without a jacket on, even in the Caribbean (oy).
This is a bit of a different type of cross-dressing heroine. Charley is living full-time as a man through much of the story, without anyone on the ship knowing her gender. Charley is in danger if her charade is found out, especially since her reputation is pretty much obliterated due to all the naked manjunk she’s seen professionally. One of the things I find really interesting about Charley is that she’s aware of the many advantages she attains by passing as a male, but she’s also aware that for every social and economic advantage, there’s an equally increased danger of violent consequences if her disguise is discovered. Charley’s uniqueness as a heroine is giving me a lot to think about.
Cross dressing heroines are often masquerading as boys for a few chapters, or maybe a few scenes or one key scene in particular, such as when Frances in Midsummer Magic dresses as a male so that she will be permitted to watch a stallion mount a mare with her husband (yes, of course, you do know what happened next). (Bow chick-a whinny snort).
The reader fascination with bending gender in romance continues. On Twitter the other night I asked about a book someone had emailed me about – the reader had read the sample and wanted to go read the rest but couldn’t remember the title. In the sample, the heroine is investigating something while disguised as a male and working as a valet to a duke. There’s a scene where the heroine shaves the hero in the bath.
The reader, L, remembered the book after emailing me – she had read the sample online, and the book isn’t out yet: it was Joanna Chambers’ The Lady’s Secret, [AMZ | BN] scheduled for publication on 7 November 2011.
Yet the query via Twitter revealed a few other recent cross-dressing heroines, including
Sabrina Jeffries’
(sorry) Sophie Jordan’s Sins of a Wicked Duke [AMZ | K | BN | K | WORD] which features an orphaned heroine who works in household service disguised as a male so as to avoid the unwanted attention of unsavory nobility who like to force themselves on their household staff. But of course her current employer is puzzled by his own interest in the heroine he thinks is a boy, and she’s totally got it bad for him and is trying to keep that to herself.
I think that’s one of my favorite and yet most frustrating stock moments in cross-dressing romance: when the hero gets all confused because he’s having feelings he can’t identify or control about another DUDE. Commence angst and self-recrimination or anger or something like that. The confusion of the hero questions gender in a way that I find fascinating – though the conclusion is that feelings for what the hero thinks is another man can often be labeled as “homosexual,” when really, it’s bisexuality the hero might be confronting. As Candy wrote back in 2005 about hero archetypes,
I’ve noted before that I enjoy it when taboos involving gender lines are broken, or at least bent and bashed around a bit. It’s part of the reason why I like romances involving cross-dressing. When the characters are feeling what seems, at the surface, to be a homosexual attraction? Love it. Love watching the characters struggle with it. Some people are squicked by the idea that the characters, by evincing this attraction, are not 100% hetero. Most of the people I know who are squicked by this aspect almost always say the hero is showing signs of being gay and they’re worried that he might run off with the footman, when really, he’s showing signs of being bisexual, and tendencies towards monogamy are not, as far as I know, exclusively associated with sexual orientation.
Overall, however, the underlying message is a pretty attractive one to me, even if it’s not necessarily realistic: that it’s the essence of somebody that’s attractive, and not necessarily their packaging, even something as powerful like gender.
Yes. That. Cross-dressing is as much a part of romance as it ever was, and makes for many an adventurous plot, even as heteronormative standards are often impressed upon the narrative (to wit: You’re not gay, that’s a GIRL. Aren’t you RELIEVED that you’re NOT GAY?!) (Cue me gritting my teeth.) As Candy wrote, part of what romance explores is the idea that these two individuals are attracted for reasons that go deeper than the “packaging.” That includes, sometimes, gender. There is often some distinct and unexplained element of attraction, something that makes the hero notice something special about the heroine, and vice versa, even when one or both are not what they appear. I love and am fascinated by the idea that what attracts us toward one another is not exclusive to gender (or race, or class, etc. as romance has also explored a bit) and that individually we are unique and our uniqueness is identifiable by those who care about us, even when we hide parts of who we are.
Do you like romances in which there’s cross-dressing? What are your favorites? What’s the most startling exploration of gender you’ve read in a romance?
This is one of my favorite tropes ever. I will read anything with cross-dressing.
Along those lines, I got to read Joanna Chambers’ debut (mentioned above) (and no, I don’t know her from Adam) and I adored it. YAY for a woman shaving a man. I’m trying to figure out how to describe this book and can’t seem to do it justice in a short space, but having the heroine invade the hero’s traditionally male spaces as a valet—and particularly the spaces where the hero thinks of himself as “alone”—allows an incredible emotional intimacy to develop between the two.
Seriously, that book was awesome.
I think men tend to disguise themselves as women more in comedies – I’m thinking of Tootsie and Mrs Doubtfire. I haven’t read any romances with that. Interesting that Heyer had both men and women cross-dressing.
oh my god, I just remembered a conversation I had wiht my BFF from elementary school who introduced me to romances Back In the Day (I think I may have been as old as 13 at this point, and she was 14:
She had read some romance that involved a girl-raised-as-a-boy for some truly excellent reason, and I was questioning the reality, because, and I think I quote, “Wouldn’t someone have noticed the…you know…” and then I made a vaguely crude gesture to indicate large breasts.
Hannah said, with the world-weariness of someone much older and wiser in the ways of the world, “People just don’t look beyond what is right in front of them. She’s presented as a guy, they’ll just accept that.”
@sugarless: excellent point, thank you!
Now adding Joanna Chambers rec to my TBR pile…
I can take or leave the cross-dressing heroine, but completely agree with Candy’s earlier post about the attraction to the essence of someone, not the packaging or gender.
One of my favorite movies, Chasing Amy, addresses that as well when lesbian Amy falls for straight Holden.
The first time I watched this scene, I immediately hoped I would recognize love, no matter how it came to me.
I can recall the first story I read where a heroine pretended to be a guy – it was a novel based on the true story of a woman who was a soldier in the revolutionary war – “The Secret Soldier”, who was outed after injured in battle.
I keep a tag of characteristics of books and I tagged the following books as having a male impersonation theme in the past year – notice it has a lot of dukes and duchesses!
———————————————-
Sins of a Wicked Duke (Penwich School for Virtuous Girls, Bk 1)
Author: Sophie Jordan
Currently 3.5/5 Stars.
Book Type: Mass Market Paperback
Publication Date: 2009
———————————————-
The Virgin’s Secret
Author: Victoria Alexander
Currently 2/5 Stars.
Book Type: Mass Market Paperback
Publication Date: 2009
—————————————————
The Accidental Mistress
Author: Tracy Anne Warren
Currently 4/5 Stars.
Book Type: Mass Market Paperback
Publication Date: 2007
—————————————————
Indiscreet
Author: Carolyn Jewel
Currently 3.5/5 Stars.
Book Type: Paperback
Publication Date: 2009
—————————————————
Nine Rules to Break When Romancing a Rake
Author: Sarah MacLean
Currently 3.5/5 Stars.
Book Type: Mass Market Paperback
Publication Date: 2010
—————————————————
Gentle Rogue (Malory)
Author: Johanna Lindsey
Currently 4/5 Stars.
Book Type: Paperback
Publication Date: 1990
—————————————————
Duchess by Night (Desperate Duchesses, Bk 3)
Author: Eloisa James
Currently 4/5 Stars.
Book Type: Mass Market Paperback
Publication Date: 2008
—————————————————
Distracting the Duchess
Author: Emily Bryan
Currently 4/5 Stars.
Book Type: Mass Market Paperback
—————————————————
Servant The Acceptance
Author: L. L. Foster
Currently 3/5 Stars.
Book Type: Mass Market Paperback
Publication Date: 8/26/2008
Crossdressing and the accompanying confusion was the focus of my last book but the plot was opposite from the woman-as-man trope. In this case, the man was the crossdresser, totally fooling the protagonist Raine when he appeared as a chantreuse at her club. There really wasn’t any confusion as to Raine’s sexuality even when she had a passing thought that there was a certain attraction. I probably should have expanded on that angle, though; it would interesting to pursue the fallout of the latent attraction. BTW, I “fashioned” my male protagonist David/Cintra from Lancer (Yellow Dancer) from Robotech (for those into ancient anime). Here’s a write up on the character: http://www.kent.net/robotech/characters/invid/lancer.shtml
See, I’m cynical: I can like someone’s heart and soul all I want, but if the packaging doesn’t do it for me, I’m not interested in any kind of sexual relationship with them, much less an exclusive one. Just how it is. (And yeah, I totally did type “package” instead of “packaging” at first.) *That* said, what I’ve read suggests that Kinsey zeroes and sixes are pretty rare, so most of us could have that one exception to our normal preferences, and the cross-dressing plot does express that. Which is cool.
I myself like the cross-dressing because it allows the hero and heroine to relax and relate to each other as friends and equals. Societal gender roles aren’t big on allowing that; they were *really* not big on it Back When; and cross-dressing allows more of the friends-to-lovers action that I dig.
Redheadgirl:
I remember one of S.M. Sterling’s earlier books positing something like that, actually, particularly for cultures with strong gender-expression binaries. I think the woman in question did have a relatively “masculine” figure, which helped, but there was a bit about how, well, this is a person in a military uniform with short hair; men in Random Bronze Age Culture have short hair and dress similarly; therefore…
Don’t know if it bears out, but it’s an interesting theory.
I always loved the moment in Dawn’s Early Light by Elswyth Thane when Julian discovers Tibby’s disguise in the middle of a battle during the American Revolution. He then asks the Marquis de Lafayette how he knew Tibby was a girl.
“Mon Dieu, I LOOKED at her!” was the reply.
Not a romance, but Emma Bull’s Bone Dance has a protagonist who is gender neutral. The revelation scene between Sparrow and Theo is wonderfully done.
Going to go watch Victor/Victoria for the umpteenth time 🙂
THIS. People all too often see only what they expect to see.
Plus, not all women develop large breasts…especially not as young women. I was an A-cup until I hit my early 20s, and now, in my early 30s, I’m a full-on D. I used to play around with dressing up like a boy in my early teens, but I quickly realized that I would only be able to pass for a 10-year-old (very small and skinny and young-looking), so it quickly became less entertaining.
Exactly. It seems risky to assume either way, so i agree that the most respectful tack is to approach them as they dictated their own lives.
I wonder if there are records of men living as women?
Forgot to mention James Tiptree, Jr. of science fiction fame. I read her biography,” James Tiptree, Jr. The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon.”
A truly amazing woman.
I love heroines in disguise as boys! I’m lucky enough to work at Carina so I got to read The Lady’s Secret ages ago—recommended! I don’t think it will disappoint any fans of the trope, I found Chambers handled the whole thing handled extremely well.
And I second the recommendation for Leviathan—I’m halfway through book 2 so I don’t know how the love interest part works out, but Deryn/Dylan is a completely capable and admirable heroine (especially compared to the male protagonist who, while sweet, is sheltered and occasionally foolish.)
I don’t usually like it in historicals/Regencies when the heroine dons the breeches, because it usually comes across as “oooh, isn’t it cute how rebellious she is. Cue the frustrated Hero!”
Sea Change didn’t come across that way at all. It totally worked for me. She wasn’t rebelling for freedom of movement or horseback riding or because she enjoyed dressing as a man for the thrill of it, she just wanted to do her job the only way she would be allowed. It wasn’t meant as a cute trope. The Hero falling for “him” was believable to me because of the amount of time they spent together talking about everything under the sun and the confined circumstances. It didn’t feel like he was especially squicked about it. I also think it helped that she wasn’t particularly feminine in appearance, even without the clothes. There were no long flowing curls tucked under a hat so they would still be available to drag across the Hero’s naked form later in the book. I loved it.
I loved “The Tokaido Road”, by Lucia St. Claire Robson (Thank you, RedHeadedGirl!!)
The heroine is cross-dressing for a believable reason, in a time that makes the clothes and weapons training possible. The hero is attracted to her as a boy, but thinks that boys are too much trouble as bedmates “inexperienced and much too worshipful in the daytime”. So he doesn’t make a pass, and only finds out later the boy was the woman he’s been paid to capture and bring back to the villain. Turns out she’s neither inexperienced nor worshipful. Really good book.
That is where my reading of this blog ended and the uncontrollable giggling started—leaving me being gawked at by all my coworkers.
Maybe I’ll try to finish the article once I get home.
This is so much fun. I haven’t thought about Robotech in years.
I’ve thought of another gender bender – Patience and Sarah by Isabel Miller. It’s a lovely f/f romance set in early America. At one point, one of the heroines runs away (after her family discovers that she’s lesbian, although they never use that term) and disguises herself as a boy. She connects with a traveling tinker or something, and he comes on to her, explaining that it’s not unnatural to be attracted to the same sex (the irony is really well done). He’s not interested once he learns she’s a woman, plus she’s not interested in men. And eventually she gets an hea with her female lover.
I loved Sea Change because it wasn’t just that she was putting on men’s clothes and voila! she magically had all the freedoms of a man without any drawbacks. There were dangers to her disguise, and she was aware of them, and she couldn’t just easily pass based on clothing and squarish features, she had had to learn to act the part, too, and think about how to handle things like keeping her secret while possibly not having privacy.
Skimming through the comments, I realized I’ve read more novels in which women pass as men or boys than I thought, but the “passing” part of those books didn’t really stick with me for some reason. Before reading the comments, the only thing that immediately popped into my head (other than lots of cross-dressing manga) was a Korean show called Coffee Prince, in which the main character is a girl who is often mistaken for a boy. She passes for a boy in order to make money for her family, even working for a coffee shop where the staff is supposed to be composed of nothing but “princes,” handsome/pretty men. One of the guys in the show starts to fall for her and has the whole “omg, am I gay?!” freak-out. Despite some storylines I didn’t quite like and my frustration with how long it took for the romance I knew was coming to actually start and go somewhere, I loved the show.
I love cross-dressing romances. I take no issue with them being relieved at not being gay. If you’re an adult who’s never had to question their sexuality, it must be pretty scary to suddenly feel like you don’t really know yourself. To have to question everything you thought you believed. It’s a life changer. Especially if we’re looking at historicals where you’re either going to live a lie and spend your life hoping no one finds out, or you’re going to be ostracized, not just by society but likely by friends and family, and you’re ability to make a living would also be in jeopardy. It’s a daunting prospect at best.
I read one a while back, I’m thinking it was in an anthology, but I could be wrong, where this girl was raised as one of three boys in the old West and everyone in town thought this girl was a guy. She was discovered by the dr when she has a miscarriage after having been raped by some criminals who attacked her and, upon figuring out she was no he, decided to have some “fun”. She then has to move in to town and learn to live as a woman.
Now that I’ve finished squeeing about Courtney Milan’s comment, I can hopefully add a coherent comment of my own! I’ll limit it to one point on plausibility.
I adore cross-dressing romance, which is one of the reasons I decided to write one, but yes, I did worry about plausibility. However, the past, as they say, is another country and two centuries ago, clothing was a much stronger signifier of gender, one that people were perhaps less likely to look behind**. To take a contemporary example, I remember watching Boy George on TV with my parents when I was about 10 or 11 and I remember us all being genuinely confused as to what gender he was. That seems ridiculous now, but this was the early 80s. In Scotland. It’s easy to forget that in other periods and cultures, people read what they see very differently than we do here and now.
**I should mention that it was a fantastic blog post by Sonomalass (which I can’t now find) that alerted me to this phenomenon.
It wasn’t in a romance, but one of my favorite books includes cross-dressing as a main aspect of its story, “The Last Report on The Miracles At Little No Horse” by Louise Erdrich. Yes there is romance! Yes there is sex! I just wouldn’t put it primarily in romance story. I haven’t managed to run across cross-dressing in my own romance-genre readings yet, I suppose.
Old School: the first half of Woodiwiss’ Ashes In The Wind.
I reread it often, even though the novel has some flaws and the second half is not as compelling as the first. I loved it when I first read it back in the eighties and it remains a go to comfort read still. Tortured dr civil war hero, misunderstood and fugitive Alaina forced to disguise herself as a filthy boy and scrub down the hospital. For me it never gets old.
LG, I thought of Coffee Prince too. It was such an incredible, compelling mess. I loved the early plot of the heroine being mistaken for a man, the hero hiring her to pretend to be his boyfriend(!) to chase away women his family kept setting him up with, and his freak out that he might be gay when he started developing feelings for our disguised heroine. What impressed me was they let the hero finally accept that he was attracted to a guy and then was extremely pissed off when the deception was revealed. After that, it got sort of ho-hum, but it was refreshing that the heroine stayed tomboyish the entire way.
@Anony – Oh, yes, the post-reveal! I forgot to mention that, although the guy has the “omg, am I gay?” period, one thing I thought was really great was that the reveal didn’t lead immediately into “phew, I’m not gay, now I’m totally ok with loving you.” I loved that he decided, after much self-torture, to accept that he had feelings for another guy, and I loved that finding out the “guy” was really a girl didn’t automatically make everything better. The reveal didn’t even make everything better with his family – I seem to remember that the grandma referred to her as a freak.
Neither of these are novels, but I have a deep and abiding love for Twelfth Night and Tootsie. I think the latter sums up one of the attractions of cross-dressing romance, when Dustin Hoffman says at the end something like “At this point in the relationship it would be helpful if I wore pants. But we’ve already done the hard part. We’re already good friends.” I think this device is especially effective in certain historical settings where relationships between men and women were so ritualized and circumscribed that the “friendship” aspect of a heterosexual relationship was inconceivable…or actively discouraged. (At one end of history you have Plato’s Symposium for this. At the other end is Carmen Martin Gaite’s Usos amorosos de la posguerra espanola (Courtship Customs of Post-War Spain) where she says something like “the greatest damage done to Spanish youth in the 1940s and 50s was an active attempt to keep boys and girls from ever conversing or knowing each other’s minds. This prohibition was ultimately far more damaging to many couples than the prohibition on knowing each other’s bodies before marriage.”) I think in a lot of historical time periods, the hero’s reaction to being attracted to a cross-dressed heroine might be less “oh, no, I can’t be attracted to someone of the same sex” but “oh, no, I can’t be FRIENDS with someone of the opposite sex.” For me, that’s the joy of Twelfth Night.
Blergh! I just finished reading “A Loving Scoundral” by Johanna Lindsey. Which someone mentioned upthread but not by title. The other commentator also mention how Danny (the heroine) had been pretending to be a boy for most of her life but the hero (A Mallory) IMMEDIATELY knows she’s female prolly cause of his mighty wang o’ power and knowledge.
The thing that bugged me though was that she is the most radiantly beautiful person ever, to the point where even though she’s working as servant in Mallory’s house the nobility will stop and notice how gorgeous she is. She was even kicked out of her gang (she’d been living in the slums as a pickpocket) because the gang leader was attracted to her (for shame because two dudes can’t love each other).
Anyway, long story short is that it doesn’t even become a plot device for much of the book. She becomes a girl full time 1/3 into the book. I just don’t understand why she used this trope at all. It has to be used well, and not just in a ridiculous let me throw pants on her.
ARGH. I’m so tired of hearing this. The terms are not mutually exclusive; it is possible to be simultaneously bisexual and monogamous. Just because I married a man, it doesn’t mean that I magically stopped being attracted to women. It just means I choose not to act on it.
I hear this argument a lot, mostly from homophobic relatives who tell me how relieved they are that I finally “made up my mind” to become straight (because according to them, gay people go to hell. Side note: if I’m bisexual, do I end up in Limbo?).
@ Erin: you beat me to the “Ashes in the Wind” cite. I love that book; it’s such a crazy mash-up of GWTW and Rebecca with crossdressing thrown into the mix. I also liked how Cole did NOT find “Al” attractive but only saw “him” as a dirty, entertaining boy in need of a friend and a bath. I liked the tension of Alaina wishing she could be a pretty, feminine girl again and wanting Cole to see her as one, but being unable to spill the beans because of her justifiable fears for her life.
Other books that have crossdressing/gender issues but that are NOT romances on the face are “Sundial In A Grave: 1610” by Mary Gentle—a story where the hero is the villain from Dumas’s “The Three Musketeers” and of course Virginia Woolf’s “Orlando” although that’s a hero who changes sex altogether rather than pretending to be one or the other.
This subject reminds me of a historical romance I read years earlier, can’t remember the title, of two men living together, with one posing as a woman and the other as *her* husband or brother. I remember the cross-dresser was fully into the role, only complained sometimes. I don’t think the romance was strong enough to remember, because I don’t remember the women from the book at all. I think they were in hiding due to legal problems. Maybe this should be a HABO entry. I still remember the details the author gave of the man shaving multiple times a day, squeezing into his ball dress, fending off suitors. It was almost like “Some Like It Hot”.
This is a particular favorite trope of mine IF it is done well. Unfortunately it rarely is, but when the author hits it out of the park, I’m in reader heaven.
@DreadPirateRachel – maybe the quote is too out of context, but you definitely misunderstood there. That was the point of the exchange. The villain is trying to make her mad, disgusted or upset with her husband, and possibly imply that her husband cannot possibly be faithful to her. She is responding by pointing out that he is monogamous, and his past doesn’t matter. The continuation, if I remember correctly, is that he calls her “unnatural” and cannot believe she can be so accepting of her husband’s sexuality. I thought it was an interesting counterpoint to the typical “oh, woe to me, I could be gay because I am attracted to a boy” plotline.
I just remembered, Dreamlands by Felicitas Ivey has cross-dressing, with a man dressing as a woman. One of the main characters was raped just prior to the beginning of the book, and, later, after he was given to another character as basically a present, he was taught how to dress and act as a woman. I’d probably put the book in the fantasy genre more than romance, simply because the character is still too damaged by the end of the book for a good HEA (although maybe the sequel takes care of that – I haven’t read it yet).
I found the cross-dressing in that one interesting, because the character as a woman came across differently than the character as a man – as a man, he seemed more damaged and fragile than he was as a woman. It’s like his female persona allowed him to distance himself from what happened to him as a man. At least with the way things were when the first book ended, I’d be more likely to believe an HEA for him as a woman than as a man.
Gah. The comments for this post have increased my TBR list by 15 books. Here’s hoping that I can cull the list after taking a closer look at book descriptions.
@madd:
Jo Goodman—Marry Me.
I know a real life couple where this happened. And they have been very happily married for years!
I also enjoyed Duchess by Night by Eloisa James. I just read it recently, and I (already!) can’t remember all my impressions, but I thought it was interesting how the hero considered being attracted to a man. One thing I could do without is the whole, “I’m attracted to a boy” thing. Boy implies not only too young, but also that the hero expects sex to go a certain way.
HABO: I read a book that I think had a sequel coming soon about a cross-dresser. It was a Regency and the woman was dressing as a male newspaper reporter and was following some nobleman around for information about a story. In the last scene involving the two, the nobleman is caught kissing the nosy reporter in a library out of anger when his brother and sister-in-law burst in. Anyone know if this book ever materialized?
Lizabeth S. Tucker: Would that be “Shadow Dance” by Anne Stuart? Two brothers on the lam, one disguised as as a woman, run across a woman on the run dressed like a boy. Hilarity and angst ensue. Love this book.
There is a non-fiction book called Female Tars by Suzanne J. Stark about women posing as men to serve aboard ships.
The first cross-dressing romance I remember reading was Laura Black’s Wild Cat. One of my favorites is Kathleen Woodiwiss’s Ashes in the Wind. In fact I pretty much only like the first part when the heroine is in disguise; once she “becomes” a woman, it goes downhill fast for me. I also like Jackie Ivie’s Lady of the Knight.
Thanks for all the other suggested reads, from both you and the other posters!
@LG @Anony Oh, Coffee Prince! I’ve got to say I was impressed with the way they managed various reactions to the ‘reveal’. It felt honest that the hero would feel so betrayed that at one point, he’s almost desperate for her to take back the truth that she’s a girl- even though theoretically he knows it’s “better” for her to be female, the reality of having to face that she’s been deceiving him the entire time he’s been falling for her (and struggling against it) is the more horrible proposition.
Although the last couple of eps lost their pacing, the tension that slowly builds when they start to fall for each other, to the reveal, to them finally coming together is pretty freakin amazing.
Just turning off the italics.