planned to read it anyway

But had I been on the fence, this WaPo review of Wesley Stace's Misfortune would have convinced me:

In this debut novel, Stace uncorks a ripping transsexual romp set in Romantic-era England, and it reads like some inspired collaboration between Charles Dickens and Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodovar: full of orphans, decadence, flouncy skirts, greed, deception, amnesia, incest, murder, religious and social intolerance, ballads, books, letters, wild farce and all manner of meditation on sexual identity. It calls to mind another regal androgyne, Virginia Woolf's Orlando, though not as literary or as tiresome. This is a fun book. Rose Old, a.k.a. Miss Fortune, is just the kind of narrator an old-fashioned yarn needs: one who makes you suspend disbelief not just willingly but with great enthusiasm.