''We are what we wear''. The politics of transvestism and cross-dressing in ''The Fox'' (1923) and Orlando (1928)

Orlando was first published in 1928 and, as the sub-title shows, officially it is a biography; more precisely, that of Vita Sackville-West, with whom Woolf was passionately in love.

Orlando and Vita are the same person, in fact a lot of episodes in the book had been really part of Vita’s life, but the act of defining this work a biography turns out to be soon clearly interpreted as a trick played by Woolf herself towards the readers.

As a matter of fact, Orlando is a big parody of the genre of biography, that Woolf wanted to revolutionize going beyond the traditional rules of writing on somebody’s life.

The narrator is very far from being objective, impartial; on the contrary, it often addresses directly the readers, he (even if we should add a slash with the personal pronoun she) doesn’t even try to avoid personal statements about for example time, love, history.
The whole book is structured as if it were a real published biography, including a fictional preface and a final index too.

But if on the one hand Woolf’s aim was to question the rigid boundaries of literary genres, on the other hand there was another category that she wanted to be turned upside down, namely, that of gender.