The Adventures of Miss Sophia Berkley and the Politics of Consent 139
this by having him saved by a woman dressed as a man, a performance she seems very capable of getting away with. There was an obsession with the cross-dressing women in eighteenthcentury culture, and she was most often configured as an individual of threat and danger. As Catherine Craft-Fairchild has emphasised, while factual accounts of cross-dressing women sometimes praised them for their attempt to enter masculine life to earn money for their children, in fiction, the cross-dressing woman was ‘blamed and punished’.81 Notably, one such female cross dresser ‘outed’ herself in 1755 in Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Charlotte Charke, where she explained how she had passed as a man for years, even to the point of getting married to a woman. Craft-Fairchild outlines that while such real transvestites were treated with relative respect, in a number of important fictional treatments of female cross-dressing, the transgressive woman is the cause of anxiety rather than celebration. For example, in Eliza Haywood’s Love in Excess (1719–20), when Moletta disguises herself as a page to follow the Count D’Elmont to France, her father contracts a fever. In Mary Davy’s The Accomplished Rake (1727), a cross-dressing woman causes her husband to die. Most famously, in Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda (1801), Harriet Freke is monstered through and because of her crossdressing, a transgression that links her with revolutionary violence and radical immorality. Darryl Jones explains that Mrs Freke, the ‘sadistic cross-dressing lesbian’, is ‘the pre-eminent 1790s “unsex’d female”, the demonic political woman’.82 Not so, however, in Sophia Berkley, whose transvestite is celebrated as brave, intelligent and brilliant, or as Horatio says, ‘had not my heart been already fixed for ever, the appearance and manners of Mademoiselle de Bellville would have engaged my whole attention’ (124). ‘She was, I think, the most perfect character I ever knew’ (125). Of course, by the time Horatio has returned to England he has proved himself to be a worthy husband to Sophia, and as different from her father as could be imagined, accepting and admiring of the powerful woman, and completely loyal and true to his first love. If his loud proclamations of his love of liberty should be read as echoing Irish Anglican patriotic opinion, then his reappearance following his apparent death suggests that, although some Patriot leaders like Henry Boyle appeared to have abandoned the Irish cause in the settlement of the Money Bill dispute, this is only an apparent desertion, and (like Horatio) a leader will eventually rise as if from the dead to reclaim his heroine (Ireland). Sophia Berkley is what Nancy K. Miller has called a ‘euphoric’ epistolary novel in that the plot leads to its heroine’s redemption through marriage (as opposed to the ‘dysphoric’ plot which sees the heroine