"Mere costumery"?: Georgette Heyer's cross-dressing novels'

This essay identifies a subgenre of popular historical romance fiction: the cross-dressing novel. This subgenre uses cross-gender disguise to insist that there is an entirely predictable and indisputable relationship between sex, gender, and sexuality. At the same time the disguise plots fail to close off the disruptive or progressive possibilities of cross-dressing. This essay has two sections. The first section offers a brief critique of the way popular fiction scholars and cultural theorists have interpreted cross-gender disguise to date. The second section is an analysis of Georgette Heyer's three cross-dressing novels, These Old Shades, The Masqueraders and the Corinthian.