Virginia Woolf, left and Vita Sackville-West. The freedom of male dress and male privilege is inverted in Woolf’s biography, as Orlando as a woman discovers how cumbersome are the clothes she must wear, and how restricted are her freedoms. Sackville-West liked to cross-dress, calling herself Julian. It is likely that the title of Woolf’s novel comes out of As You Like It, where the heroine Rosalind disguises herself as Ganymede, and in that guise teaches the man she loves – Orlando – how to love in return. Shakespeare loved gender disguises – a girl who’s a boy who’s a boy who’s a girl – and of course as women were not allowed on the London stage in Shakespeare’s day, every female role was cross-gender. In The Arabian Nights, there are both gender switching plots and cross-dressing. Ovid’s Metamorphoses is a playful and serious treatise on the shiftability of form – especially human form, as humans turn into trees or animals, or the gods embody themselves as human to pursue their love interests. O rlando is not the first piece of fiction about a sex change.
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