Twenty years after publication, we have finally received a translation of one of the most famous novels by Patricia Danker, a British writer, traces of whose translation into Russian can be found somewhere in the 2000s, when, contrary to all the canons of marketing, her “Seven Tales of Sex and of death". Indeed, Danker is a completely non-commercial writer, but very interesting - in how she skillfully combines intellectualism with understandable humor, in how deftly she can pull the thread of modernity into historical facts, and in how well she brings to the surface not the most obvious or obvious forgotten stories. Her 1999 novel “James Miranda Barry” is just such a wonderful fit of reality into a novel story, a story about a true past that suddenly turns out to be more fascinating than any adventure, and its hero is James Miranda Barry, a woman who has lived her whole life in a man’s guise and who made an incredible career in spite of the 19th century - in 2019 it turns out to be even more necessary for the reader than before.