Orlando’s Unseen Face

Abstract

Abstract In this essay, I propose to complicate the paradigm of circulation through a close look at a case in which a unique life story, of the sexually ambiguous Chevalier d’ Éon (1728–1810), crosses back and forth across generic as well as national boundaries, reaching a nodal point when he receives an entry in the Dictionary of National Biography edited by Virginia Woolf’s father, and then becomes the model for her hero/ine Orlando. The Chevalier has never before been discussed by Woolf scholars, who have paid little attention to Woolf’s foreign intertexts, but a broader understanding of the concept of circulation as developed by David Damrosch, Franco Moretti and Pascale Casanova will help me reveal the route of this hidden source from France to Russia and then to England, and can enable us to see Woolf’s gender- and genre-bending novel as a prime example of globality and worldliness.