Virginia Woolf’s ‘Orlando’, the ultimate shapeshifter, is now a madcap graphic novel

“Orlando had become a woman – there is no denying it. But in every other respect, Orlando remained precisely as he had been.”

“Orlando was a man until the age of thirty; when he became a woman and has remained so ever since.”

With their unabashed acceptance of gender fluidity, these declarations ring with the politics of our present moment. They would be at home in a contemporary trans memoir or Instagram caption. Over on X, they would send a certain children’s author and her followers into a predictable frenzy.

Remarkably, however, these sentences were penned almost a century ago. In 1928, to be precise, when Virginia Woolf published Orlando: A Biography, the story of a 16th-century English nobleman who lives for four centuries and one day wakes up in the body of a woman.

A speculative romp across time and the gender binary, Orlando was inspired by Woolf’s love affair with the aristocrat Vita Sackville-West, a fellow member of the very queer milieu of modernist writers and artists known as the Bloomsbury Group.

Long beloved as a trailblazing queer text, described by Sackville-West’s son as “the longest and most charming love letter in literature”, Orlando has now been given fresh life as a graphic novel authored by German writer and illustrator Susanne Kuhlendahl.

Over 200 pages of exuberant...

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