What is it about?
This essay unfolds a previously unseen connection between Virginia Woolf's gender-shifting protagonist Orlando and the eighteenth-century French-born diplomat, spy, writer, and traveler, the Chevalier d'Éon, who lived for 49 years as a man and then for 33 as a woman, Mademoiselle de Beaumont.
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Why is it important?
This discovery situates Virginia Woolf's novel in a broader European context, revealing the foreign sources behind an apparently local pattern, and is an important case study for both Woolf's and d'Éon's scholars, as well as for those interested in World Literature, gender studies, the genre of biography or fictional biography.
Perspectives
I hope this article changes the long-established view on Woolf's "Orlando", usually analyzed as a tribute to Vita Sackville-West's tedious book "Knole and the Sackvilles". Using a detective approach, my essay reconstructs Woolf's trajectory in recomposing the lost figure of the Chevalier d'Éon, enabling us to see this farcical novel beyond the English tradition alone and linking Orlando with d'Éon's intriguing life and personality.
Maria Dabija
Harvard University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Orlando’s Unseen Face, Journal of World Literature, March 2021, Brill,
DOI: 10.1163/24056480-20210003.
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