The little household-which includes Arthur Deneve, Blanche’s pimp and former circus partner, and Ernest Girard, Arthur’s over-attached best friend-is unsettled by her visit. A French circus bareback rider, Blanche Beunon, working in San Francisco in the 1870s as a burlesque dancer and high-priced prostitute, brings home to Chinatown a new friend: the cross-dressing, straight-talking Jenny Bonnet. Irish writer Emma Donoghue’s beguiling eighth novel, Frog Music, is a hybrid of those carefully researched entertainments and experiments like Gravity’s Rainbow that are set in the past but not about it.

“I hated historical novels with fluttering cloaks,” Winterson said elsewhere. The genre’s appeal was (and still is, for the most part) in time travel: accurate period details, the romance of the past. You could finish your Michener then bludgeon your neighbor with it. With a few exceptions, like Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, the postwar historical novel in English was the meat-and-two-veg of popular literature: enjoyable, sometimes skillfully-made, but artistically conventional. This was long before Hilary Mantel earned her two Bookers. In fat black felt tip angled across the printed form, Winterson let rip: she wrote experimental fiction, not historical novels–not, I think she put it, “ crap.” It was the kind of unhinged overreaction that makes you change seats on the train. Many years ago, a photocopy quietly made the rounds among editors’ assistants in London: Jeanette Winterson’s enraged response to a questionnaire sent to her by some clueless publisher of a directory of historical novelists.

Frog music by emma donoghue