I hereby declare an interest. I wrote the most recent of many fictions based on the life of the character that is the subject of Rachel Holmes's eloquent and original biography, Dr James Miranda Barry. Barry was the famous 19th-century colonial doctor who initiated numerous military and medical reforms in far-flung corners of the empire where he worked as a surgeon and inspector of hospitals. Scandal and glamour followed Barry wherever he went. At his death, he was rumoured to have been a woman all along. Holmes's work has a title that is arguably more suitable for a novel, whereas I gave my fiction my hero's name, in deliberate imitation of the grand 19th-century novels with eponymous heroes and heroines. Delightfully, in any narrative within which he figures, Barry can be both. Holmes points out that Barry always generates a flurry of contradictory pronouns and a desperate desire for the truth of the body. Was he a woman or a man?
Biography has a duty to the facts. Fiction has a duty to the reader. Real lives are random and chaotic, governed by chance and accident. Fiction arranges accidents into patterns. Significant charismatic characters cannot simply vanish from the frame. But they can and do in the real world. And so Barry's patron and probable lover, Lord Somerset, weathers the sex scandal generated by their relationship at the Cape Colony and dies halfway through the biography, extravagantly mourned by Barry, who nevertheless recovers sufficiently to continue his controversial and successful career.
Holmes argues that biographers are resurrection men in the Burke and Hare mould. Like Barry, they specialise in anatomy and dissection. But if the biographer is a tomb raider, then the novelist has the even graver task of breathing life into the corpse. Holmes does dramatise some scenes to convincing and vivid effect. Her description of Barry arriving in the Cape, daring and resplendent in his fantastic costumes, makes the character luminous, charismatic. She gives us the flavour of the man. Holmes keeps the scholarly apparatus to the minimum. I find this a pity, being a lover of footnotes and sources; but her reinterpretation of the scanty particulars available on Barry's life is provocative and accessible. There are some wonderful set pieces: what the London dandies actually wore; how to dissect the body of a murderer; the landscapes of South Africa; the symptoms of leprosy. There is a remarkable reading of the only existing photograph of Barry.
The trump card in this biographical pack turns out to be the most unlikely piece of evidence: Barry's Latin student thesis on femoral hernias. Hermaphrodites were often suspected of suffering from hernias, until their true intersexual nature was determined. What looked like a hernia was simply a pair of dangling testicles. Barry's teacher and mentor Sir Astley Cooper was also an expert on hernias. The study of hernias involved a profound investigation of the genitals and the reproductive organs. Barry studied the sexual difference. But he occupied the middle ground. He was neither male nor female, he was both.
Barry's sexual secret has overshadowed and determined all our speculation concerning his origins and sexuality. But should it? His genius as a surgeon, his creation of a leper colony in Africa, his achievement as the first doctor to perform a successful Caesarean operation, his innovative hygiene reforms, his fame as a conversationalist and elegant dandy all gave him a tremendous reputation in his lifetime. Barry was famous. His deeds inflamed gossip and made news. I agree with Holmes that, because Barry chose to live as a man and be known as a man, "his choice of identity should be respected". I chose to tell a version of his story in a split narrative: I/he, a private life of indeterminate sexual identity and a public life as "a gentleman, a man of honour and an Englishman".
Radical theorists of sexuality now look to intersexual and transgressively transgendered figures as solutions to the impasse of gender. If feminism has failed to free women from their prison of low pay, victim status and sexual violence, then perhaps we should cease to be women. This is an attractive idea, but it is beside the point. If Dr James Barry, who was almost certainly born and raised as Margaret Bulkley, could have studied medicine, joined the army, risen to a senior rank and travelled the world while remaining female, he probably wouldn't have bothered to change sex. He had a choice: a life of unmarried boredom, genteel poverty and embroidery, or independence and adventure. Which would you choose?
Patricia Duncker's latest novel is The Deadly Space Between. James Miranda Barry is out in paperback (both Picador)
