“The Change Was Delightful!”

Abstract This essay challenges the critical interpretation of one of the central characters from Lillie Devereux Blake's Fettered for Life (1874), Frank Heywood, as a female cross-dresser, because much in the novel points to his being trans. Rather than play into reductive tropes of gender revelation, the essay examines how the novel frames the two intimate recognitions of Frank's differently gendered history. Sometimes violent interruptions in Frank's travel form the backdrops for these key moments of vulnerability and time dilation, suggesting that encountering time also demands reckoning with gender. Indeed, Blake's narrative equivocations demonstrate the difficulties she faced in representing Frank's gender history. The author argues that reading Frank without transness mobilizes the same normativizing, medico-juridical logics governing the experiences of the novel's cis women. Fettered for Life in fact invites a trans reading practice that can be mobilized as part of a feminism founded on solidarity across embodiment and experience. This essay draws this out through the intimate moments of recognizing Frank's past as a girl, and the novel's suggestion that this past does not undo his lived embodiment as a man.