“Although eighteenth-century usage of ‘fox’ indicated a man,” the scholar elaborates, “now, of course, ‘fox’ broadly denotes a fetching individual of whatever gender. . . . Perhaps ‘fox’ has emerged, ungendered, from the embrace of early modern rogues, to signify simply an object of desire. A dark-eyed woman has caught his attention, and he is intimidated (he’s as yet unused to the name Jack, and hyperconscious of the bandages constraining his chest), but to the woman, Sheppard tells himself, he isn’t “anything but another clinker fox,” or clever man-and then Voth jumps in. (Voth intersperses critical commentary with tales of his own present-day loves and losses.) Jack has just slipped free of the cruel carpenter keeping him as an indentured servant. Or so Jordy Rosenberg would have it in “ Confessions of the Fox,” a début novel that weaves together the “found” memoirs of London’s eighteenth-century arch-renegade with the annotations of a rogue professor, Dr.
Photograph by Beowulf Sheehanīefore he became the pickpocket and prison escapee immortalized as Mack the Knife in Brecht’s “Threepenny Opera,” Jack Sheppard was a nervous kid trying to talk to a sex worker at a pub. “Confessions of the Fox,” Jordy Rosenberg’s début novel, reimagines the infamous British thief Jack Sheppard as a transgender man.
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