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

Helvetiq “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.

Review: Orlando: A Graphic Novel by Virginia Woolf, adapted by Susanne Kuhlendahl (Helvetiq) 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 illustration, accompanied by text cribbed from the original novel, we follow Orlando from the court of Queen Elizabeth I, to Sultan Mehmet IV’s Constantinople, to the (literally) colourless morality of Victorian England, before finally ploughing into the dazzling modernity of the “present moment”: a London department store on the morning of October 11 1928.

Orlando has been described as ‘the longest and most charming love letter in literature’.

Helvetiq Charismatic shapeshifter and nonbinary icon As in the original, the fantastical narrative makes no attempt to explain itself.

Nor does it acknowledge its departures from realist storytelling.

Neither Orlando nor their contemporaries appears perplexed by this spectre of gender-bending immortality.

It’s a playful and lighthearted text, described by Woolf in her diary as a “writer’s holiday” from the aesthetic ambition of To the Lighthouse (1927).