Why did Albert need a woman to run the shop?

It was a hard story for me to follow....because I couldn't quite get where the characters stood on things half the time. For instance, when Hugh doesn't tell Albert about her own situation in their first bedroom scene, it caused me later to think, "Uh...Wha? If Hugh...."

Apparently, in the source material, Hugh does tell Albert about her own life right away when she grasps what's going on...but they thought it created some suspense to drag this out in the movie. BUT WHY WOULD SOMEONE???

I like the review that appeared in the New Yorker:

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The title role in Albert Nobbs goes to Glenn Close, who played it Off Broadway thirty years ago and has striven ever since to bring it to the screen. She co-wrote and co-produced the film, and is seldom out of our sight. But what do we see? Albert is a woman dressed as a man, in the Ireland of the late eighteen-hundreds, yet what Close serves up is neither man nor woman, flesh nor fowl, but a strange hieratic hybrid of no discernible identity. She walks as though freshly risen from the dead, patrolling the streets and corridors in a stiffened glide, with those dark, deep-sunk eyes of hers staring hard ahead. Albert is a waiter in an upmarket Dublin hotel, and the uniform adds starch to her otherworldliness: grief-black suit and tie, snowy shirt, and, for outdoors, a rolled umbrella and an ill-fitting bowler hat. What you feel, watching Close, is not that you are watching gender being bent into new, absorbing shapes but that you might as well have stayed home and leafed through a book on Magritte.

The hotel is run by Mrs. Baker (Pauline Collins), aflutter with aspirational cooing, while a colorful cast, including Brendan Gleeson and Brenda Fricker, portrays the other residents. Gleeson is as reliably rooted as ever, depicting a boozy and bearded quack named Holloran, who dines with the guests but, when the fancy moves him, breakfasts with the domestics, one of whom, moreover, he gorges on in bed. Joyce would have known the type.

Throughout the movie, too much time and fuss are expended on a dull romance between a roseate maid (Mia Wasikowska) and a handyman (Aaron Johnson), although the director, Rodrigo Garcia, may have been forced in this direction simply because he could not find enough to do with his central character. Albert's vision of quitting the hotel and opening a tobacconist's shop, for example, is delivered not once but on repeated occasions as an actual vision, robed in a golden glow, and the thoughts that float across her, or his (or, if we are honest, its) mind are muttered out loud, in soliloquy. While formulating an unlikely plan, for instance, that she will propose to the maid, Albert stops and asks, with nobody in earshot, "Should I tell her before we are married or save it for the wedding night?"

Such awkwardness is, to an extent, inevitable; it shows Close and her collaborators bumping into the age-old conundrum of how best to represent interior monologue onscreen. The film is adapted from a short story by George Moore, which appeared in a 1927 volume called Celibate Lives. There Albert describes herself as a "perhapser," but the problem with such indecision, as voiced by Close, is that it makes Albert sound like a simpleton, regardless of the agonies that may be imposed upon society by the need for sexual choice. That is why Albert Nobbs awakes so bracingly whenever Janet McTeer marches into view. She plays Hubert Page, a housepainter who comes to redecorate the hotel and has to share a bed with Albert. By a merry coincidence, Hubert, too, turns out to be a woman underneath, baring an unmistakable and frankly regal bosom to make her point.

It says much for McTeer that the obvious question "What are the chances of two cross-dressers meeting trouser to trouser in late-nineteenth-century Dublin?" hardly enters our minds. Stately and swaggering, taller than most of the men, and sporting the dark forelock of the natural rake, McTeer, who has been Oscar-nominated for best supporting actress, carries conviction as easily as she wears her breeches and corduroy jacket, transforming Hubert's rangy physical confidence into a larger embrace of life's amusements and kicks. She is no perhapser but a thoroughgoing yes-woman, like Molly Bloom. The sad thing is that, from the opening shot of a guttering flame, Albert Nobbs prefers to take its cue (timorous, subdued, and reluctant to risk a smile) from the title character. Imagine a different film on a similar theme, with Hubert moved to center stage and Garcia replaced by Pedro Almodovar, for whom cross-dressers in a Catholic country would be meat and drink. Poor Albert could then retreat into the shadows, where he so evidently belongs, emerging only to pour the wine and clear away the feast.