These footnotes reveal what Voth discovered while reading and analyzing the manuscript, and in a narrative line that becomes something of a subplot, how his work on the manuscript was taken over and manipulated by the powers that be at the university where he worked. Voth, which appears in footnotes juxtaposed with the main text.

Throughout the book, the book parallels the manuscript’s narrative of Jack and Bess with narrative of Dr.

As the main narrative continues, it describes the intensifying relationship between Jack and Bess their involvement with the leader of a corrupt ring of thieves and politicians, Jonathan Wild and how their efforts to make a new and freer life for themselves eventually resulted in an attempt to rob one of Wild’s ships. Narration also describes how he finally found the courage to escape his servitude as a result of getting involved with a beautiful young prostitute named Bess, who was South Asian. Jack, meanwhile, prays that after death, he be allowed to return to the bedside of his beloved Bess, with whom he shared significant, and frequent, sexual ecstasy.įollowing that second prologue, the narrative begins its consideration of Jack’s life – how he was apprenticed, while still outwardly identifying as female, to a ruthless carpenter how, over a period of years, he discovered his skills as a manipulator of objects, the fluidity of his gender identity, and his desire for sex with women. As Sheppard arrives and is prepared for hanging, the crowd shouts that he should be freed, and the politicians executed instead. It describes, in a style appropriate to the period in which it is set (late 1700’s England) the execution of renowned thief and escape artist Jack Sheppard. Voth describes events in present-day America - his discovery of the Sheppard manuscript, his discovery of the different layers of meaning it contains, and his impulsive decision to escape his life and work, taking the manuscript with him.įollowing the foreward, there is something of another prologue, apparently the first chapter of the manuscript. The narrative begins with what is identified as an “Editor’s Foreward,” but which is in fact something of a prologue. Voth, a trans man and scholar who discovered the manuscript telling Sheppard’s story analyzed it and who contemplates his own life and experiences within the context of what he finds in it. The first is associated with the story of real-life thief and escape artist Jack Sheppard the second, developed through a series of footnotes and other interjections, is associated with the story of Dr. One World, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. The following version of this book was used to create this study guide: Rosenberg, Jordy.

Confessions of the fox a novel