The Temporality of Modernist Life Writing in the Era of Transsexualism: Virginia Woolf’s Orlando and Einar Wegener’s Man Into Woman

Abstract

In this essay, I argue that Woolf’s fantastic novel, Orlando (1928), is more true to the experience of transsexualism than is the allegedly authentic account provided in Man into Woman: An Authentic Record of a Change of Sex (1933), the biography-memoir of Danish artist Einar Wegener, who, as Lili Elbe, can lay claim to the title of the first transsexual. Orlando reconfigures notions not just of gender but of time, history, and the very nature of life-writing itself, producing a new model of life writing that I call a transgenre .

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