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The Woman in the Portrait
The collected short fiction of Juliet Jacques, one of the UK's most pioneering transgender writers.
In 1920's Berlin, the recovered diaries of transgender model Heike expose her as the mysterious muse and subject behind Christian Schad's best-known painting. After signing her Gender Recognition Certificate, a trans woman channels the offbeat glamour of a forgotten movie star at a Brighton gay bar. A well-known journalist finds herself under public scrutiny after taking a private BDSM game out onto the streets of Soho. Transfixed by the psychic power of monuments, an artist crowdfunds to build a tribute to victims of austerity, only to find himself the subject of a political backlash.
Taking us on a smart, funny, and deeply political ride through art, sex, and discovery, The Woman in the Portrait collects the short fiction of ground-breaking transgender writer Juliet Jacques. Showcasing both previously published and unpublished works, these stories offer an era-spanning tour through culture, politics, and community, presented with Jacques' trademark originality, insight, and humour.
In 1920's Berlin, the recovered diaries of transgender model Heike expose her as the mysterious muse and subject behind Christian Schad's best-known painting. After signing her Gender Recognition Certificate, a trans woman channels the offbeat glamour of a forgotten movie star at a Brighton gay bar. A well-known journalist finds herself under public scrutiny after taking a private BDSM game out onto the streets of Soho. Transfixed by the psychic power of monuments, an artist crowdfunds to build a tribute to victims of austerity, only to find himself the subject of a political backlash.
Taking us on a smart, funny, and deeply political ride through art, sex, and discovery, The Woman in the Portrait collects the short fiction of ground-breaking transgender writer Juliet Jacques. Showcasing both previously published and unpublished works, these stories offer an era-spanning tour through culture, politics, and community, presented with Jacques' trademark originality, insight, and humour.
336 pages, Paperback
Published July 18, 2024
5 people are currently reading
128 people want to read
About the author
Juliet Jacques
25 books51 followersJuliet Jacques (born Redhill, Surrey in 1981) is a British journalist, critic and writer of short fiction, known for her work on the transgender experience, including her transition as a trans woman.
She grew up in Horley, and attended Reigate Grammar School for two years before her parents moved her to a local comprehensive school, followed by the College of Richard Collyer in Horsham, West Sussex, studying History at the University of Manchester and then Literature and Film at the University of Sussex.
In 2007, she published a book on English avant-garde author Rayner Heppenstall for Dalkey Archive Press, and her memoir, entitled Trans, appeared on Verso Books in 2015. She has written regular columns for The Guardian, on gender identity, and The New Statesman, on literature, film, art and football, and published extensively on film in Filmwaves, Vertigo and Cineaste. She began writing a chronicle of her gender reassignment in 2010, which was widely praised. She contributed a section in Sheila Heti's book, "Women in Clothes" in 2014.
She was longlisted for The Orwell Prize in 2011 for her series on gender reassignment. In 2012 she was selected as one of The Independent on Sunday Pink List’s most influential journalists, and was also included in the 2013 list.
(from Wikipedia)
She grew up in Horley, and attended Reigate Grammar School for two years before her parents moved her to a local comprehensive school, followed by the College of Richard Collyer in Horsham, West Sussex, studying History at the University of Manchester and then Literature and Film at the University of Sussex.
In 2007, she published a book on English avant-garde author Rayner Heppenstall for Dalkey Archive Press, and her memoir, entitled Trans, appeared on Verso Books in 2015. She has written regular columns for The Guardian, on gender identity, and The New Statesman, on literature, film, art and football, and published extensively on film in Filmwaves, Vertigo and Cineaste. She began writing a chronicle of her gender reassignment in 2010, which was widely praised. She contributed a section in Sheila Heti's book, "Women in Clothes" in 2014.
She was longlisted for The Orwell Prize in 2011 for her series on gender reassignment. In 2012 she was selected as one of The Independent on Sunday Pink List’s most influential journalists, and was also included in the 2013 list.
(from Wikipedia)
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
August 2, 2024
My father moved further down the London-Brighton line, to its midway point, too far from either for me to find a nightlife, a culture life, much life at all.
I first came to Juliet Jacques in 2018 as one of the array of writers in Isabel Waidner's Liberating the Canon: An Anthology of Innovative Literature, one of many who have gone on to capture by attention, and that of the wider literary world, with their work.
I then read Jacques's striking 2021 work Variations, ostensibly a short-story collection but which for me was a novel, the whole cohering to paint a fascinating, powerful and innovatively written history of the transgender community in Britain over the last 175 years.
The Woman in the Portrait is subtitle Collected Short Stories 2008-2024 and brings together 21 more stories written over the period, many of which have been published in print or online, including the tenderly sketched coming-of-age story The Holiday Camp which was the piece chosen by Waidner. Waidner's introduction to the author and to this piece read:
This is necessarily a less coherent work, the stories largely presented in chronological order of writing, and I think would have benefitted from a foreword from either the author or a reviewer of their work to put the pieces in context.
Nevertheless Jacques is an impressive writer, and the collection showcases the wide range of formats in which she writes, from works like The Holiday Camp, through dream-sequence type works, transcripts of plays/film-scripts, creative ekphrastic writing on imagined works of art and dystopian stories.
The title story was one of my favourite pieces, and is perhaps closest in style to Variations. It is based on Christian Schad's 1927 work Self-Portrait with Model. The identity of the model is unknown to art historians but the story imagines the mystery being solved after the discovery of the diary of a transgender hostess at a Berlin nightclub.
The creative 'Corridors of Power' starts with a nod to the 1980s ZX Spectrum game Frankie Goes to Hollywood, with two artists infiltrating the inner sanctum at Annabel’s.
On a personal interest level, while reading 'One Hundred Years Ago; I chanced across the line that opens my review and realised that Jacques and I both lived in the Redhill area in the 1990s (Jacques born in the town), and the locale features in several of the stories, most notably in A Review of A Return, written as a review of the (ficticious) film 'A Return' by the queer experimental filmmaker JG Singer by one of their schoolmates, who was also exploring their gender identity and sexuality at the same time, and which feels closely autobiographical. It also contains a nod to a real-life novel whose existence I had not be aware of:
There are a few establishing shots to tell us more about what kind of town this is: a large Waitrose and an old but well-maintained department store; a sign for Harley Tyre & Exhaust (that may have inspired the pun that opens Shena Mackay's 1986 novel 'Redhill Rococo', set in the next town up, where the protagonist sees Redhill exhausts and tires' when getting off the train there); and the big Wetherspoon pub, in what was once "a grand cinema, back in the Thirties". (He's wrong about this: the cinema was demolished in 1981, and the Art Deco building used to be a car showroom, run by the family of local racing driver Jack Fairman, after whom the pub is named.) Then Singer takes us to the secondary school — the only one in the town — to poke at their memory further, having already set up an unhappy time there with that earlier anecdote.
If new to Jacques work I would start with Variations, but this is also highly worthwhile and both books are published by Cipher Press:
About the publisher
Cipher Press is an independent publisher of queer fiction and non-fiction. Our aim is to amplify queer voices and to champion LGBTQIA+ writers in the UK and beyond.
We want to publish authors who are creating a new literary canon by disrupting existing narratives and retelling them in new ways. We want to publish the many different stories that make up our community, and we want to make those stories accessible to everyone.
We’re entirely queer owned and run because we want the publishing industry to be more inclusive at every level. We have over a decade’s worth of bookselling, publishing, and editorial experience under our belts. We still don’t often see the kind of books we want to see on shelves, and we’d like to change that by finding authors who excite us and by publishing books that we love.
We’re especially keen to publish those who are further marginalised within our own community: people of colour, working class, trans and gender non-conforming authors.
I first came to Juliet Jacques in 2018 as one of the array of writers in Isabel Waidner's Liberating the Canon: An Anthology of Innovative Literature, one of many who have gone on to capture by attention, and that of the wider literary world, with their work.
I then read Jacques's striking 2021 work Variations, ostensibly a short-story collection but which for me was a novel, the whole cohering to paint a fascinating, powerful and innovatively written history of the transgender community in Britain over the last 175 years.
The Woman in the Portrait is subtitle Collected Short Stories 2008-2024 and brings together 21 more stories written over the period, many of which have been published in print or online, including the tenderly sketched coming-of-age story The Holiday Camp which was the piece chosen by Waidner. Waidner's introduction to the author and to this piece read:
Juliet Jacques‘s acclaimed Trans: A Memoir (Verso’s title) combines trans history, queer theory and autobiography to produce a quite different kind of memoir, not unlike US writer Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts (2015) combines gender theory with personal accounts of queer pregnancy and filmmaker Harry Dodge’s (Nelson’s partner) top surgery. The Holiday Camp (Jacques, LTC) is a short fiction about teenager Sam’s first experiments with drag in the context of the titular British holiday camp. Against a backdrop of provincial transphobic and homophobic bullying (gaylord, bender, and my personal favourite ‘Are you a girl or a boy?’), Sam (in drag) takes herself to the ball (so to speak), even if the ball is in Reigate, Surrey. Jacques may or may not have enrolled autobiographical elements. But I’d be surprised if anyone wrote homophobia and closeted longing as well as this if they hadn’t experienced it.
This is necessarily a less coherent work, the stories largely presented in chronological order of writing, and I think would have benefitted from a foreword from either the author or a reviewer of their work to put the pieces in context.
Nevertheless Jacques is an impressive writer, and the collection showcases the wide range of formats in which she writes, from works like The Holiday Camp, through dream-sequence type works, transcripts of plays/film-scripts, creative ekphrastic writing on imagined works of art and dystopian stories.
The title story was one of my favourite pieces, and is perhaps closest in style to Variations. It is based on Christian Schad's 1927 work Self-Portrait with Model. The identity of the model is unknown to art historians but the story imagines the mystery being solved after the discovery of the diary of a transgender hostess at a Berlin nightclub.
The creative 'Corridors of Power' starts with a nod to the 1980s ZX Spectrum game Frankie Goes to Hollywood, with two artists infiltrating the inner sanctum at Annabel’s.
On a personal interest level, while reading 'One Hundred Years Ago; I chanced across the line that opens my review and realised that Jacques and I both lived in the Redhill area in the 1990s (Jacques born in the town), and the locale features in several of the stories, most notably in A Review of A Return, written as a review of the (ficticious) film 'A Return' by the queer experimental filmmaker JG Singer by one of their schoolmates, who was also exploring their gender identity and sexuality at the same time, and which feels closely autobiographical. It also contains a nod to a real-life novel whose existence I had not be aware of:
There are a few establishing shots to tell us more about what kind of town this is: a large Waitrose and an old but well-maintained department store; a sign for Harley Tyre & Exhaust (that may have inspired the pun that opens Shena Mackay's 1986 novel 'Redhill Rococo', set in the next town up, where the protagonist sees Redhill exhausts and tires' when getting off the train there); and the big Wetherspoon pub, in what was once "a grand cinema, back in the Thirties". (He's wrong about this: the cinema was demolished in 1981, and the Art Deco building used to be a car showroom, run by the family of local racing driver Jack Fairman, after whom the pub is named.) Then Singer takes us to the secondary school — the only one in the town — to poke at their memory further, having already set up an unhappy time there with that earlier anecdote.
If new to Jacques work I would start with Variations, but this is also highly worthwhile and both books are published by Cipher Press:
About the publisher
Cipher Press is an independent publisher of queer fiction and non-fiction. Our aim is to amplify queer voices and to champion LGBTQIA+ writers in the UK and beyond.
We want to publish authors who are creating a new literary canon by disrupting existing narratives and retelling them in new ways. We want to publish the many different stories that make up our community, and we want to make those stories accessible to everyone.
We’re entirely queer owned and run because we want the publishing industry to be more inclusive at every level. We have over a decade’s worth of bookselling, publishing, and editorial experience under our belts. We still don’t often see the kind of books we want to see on shelves, and we’d like to change that by finding authors who excite us and by publishing books that we love.
We’re especially keen to publish those who are further marginalised within our own community: people of colour, working class, trans and gender non-conforming authors.
November 4, 2024
"All I am is literature, and I am not able or willing to be anything else."
Het laatste verhaal gaf me de kriebels :))
Het laatste verhaal gaf me de kriebels :))
December 24, 2025
i would definitely read more by the author, while i know i’m not the smartest guy some of the stories my eyes glazed over, these ones stuck with me
i’m too sad to tell you about, nazimova, the woman in the portrait, the hoillday camp, the art of control, sertaline surrealism (after claude cahun), one hundred years ago, a review of return, a typical day, d.c.b.: a partial retrospective, the monument
i’m too sad to tell you about, nazimova, the woman in the portrait, the hoillday camp, the art of control, sertaline surrealism (after claude cahun), one hundred years ago, a review of return, a typical day, d.c.b.: a partial retrospective, the monument
December 19, 2024
Unsurprisingly I really liked the art historical stories. The final story about AI and art really bumped it up for me as well. There were a couple of more middling ones that I felt were a little self-indulgent, with little challenge to a specific perspective. Overall I did really like the variety of writing styles and takes on gender and politics.
September 16, 2024
As one of the short stories says “it’s full of lived experience. Just not yours” which is true whilst reading this.
Some stories were definitely better than others, but that’s part of a reading a collection I suppose
Some stories were definitely better than others, but that’s part of a reading a collection I suppose
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews