Help with backstory for cross-dressing woman writer in 1780s London?

[readingredhead]

It's that time of year again...novel-writing time! This year's novel -- presently titled Chasing Ghosts, though we all know these things are subject to change -- is managing to combine lots of things I find totally fascinating (18th century London, woman writers, the French Revolution, cross-dressing, modern academia, etc.) and I am actually very

Comments

[w455up]

I want to recommend Terry Pratchett's Monstrous Regiment, but there are lers of the spoi variety, so let us take a small interlude where one may avoid said spoi lers

[readingredhead]

I actually started reading Monstrous Regiment at one point, got about 200 pages in, and then something happened (I have no memory as to what) and I stopped reading it. I really *do* need to get back to it...and to Pratchett in general, who I've never really gotten hooked on. But the advice you've extrapolated from Pratchett makes good sense, and I like the idea that Dorothea might not be the only one in a predicament like this -- though now I have to figure out how she'd run into someone else in a similar position...

I guess also part of my problem is that the intellectual circle I want Dorothea to end up in was fairly radical for its time. They would have been perfectly fine with Dorothea being a woman and doing all the things she wanted to do. But something big has to happen before she ends up belonging to this circle, that makes her feel like "coming clean" about her real gender identity is just not possible, even within this small group of people who probably wouldn't care

[w455up]

Perhaps the reason that she doesn't reveal herself is due to someone peripherally involved in the group fell for Dorothea before she took on the disguise (and she's kind of creeped out by that person, perhaps a rival publisher), making her question things seriously whether she can afford to reveal herself