May 2026

Orlando and Orlando: Sex Change, Same House

No matter the novel to follow, the opening phrase of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, “He---for there could be no doubt of his sex,” performs certainty before ambiguity has yet emerged as a problem (1). The novel’s narrator insists upon the masculinity of the sentence’s subject with peculiar aggression, as though sex is a characteristic that one must actively name rather than naturally perceive. The sentence weakens its own authority with the subsequent qualification, “though the fashion of the time did something to disguise it,” which undermines the narrator’s certainty almost immediately after it is proclaimed (1). Masculinity here appears simultaneously undeniable and vulnerable to surface appearance. Gender enters the novel already mediated through costume, or “fashion,” before it enters through anatomy as sex. The opening sentence therefore stages a contradiction that will structure the novel at large, namely that sex appears unstable at the very moment the protagonist is being secured as socially and narratively intelligible. 

The protagonist remains unnamed as he is “in the act of slicing at the head of a Moor which swung from the rafters” (1). The frequentative force of “slicing at” suggests repetition rather than singular action; the violence feels habitual, almost playful, considering the later comparison of the severed head to “an old football” (1). More striking still is the opening paragraph’s uneven distribution of grammatical personhood. The protagonist, immediately referred to as “He,” enters the novel fully stabilized as a subject. The Moor, by contrast, oscillates between object and person. His head is first referred to with the pronoun “which,” then “it,” and finally, at the paragraph’s close, as “him” (1). The narrator ascribes humanity to the Moor only after the Moor has been subordinated to the protagonist as imperial trophy and aristocratic toy. The Moor is denied stable subjectivity from the novel’s opening page; the protagonist’s sex may become unstable later in the narrative, but their subjectivity never does.

A novel whose title is its protagonist’s first name would seem to be concerned with the character as an individual. It is a surprise that the protagonist’s name first appears in the novel as a marker of his lineage. Woolf introduces the name “Orlando” in a sentence about hereditary continuity, as she writes, “Orlando’s father, or perhaps his grandfather, had struck [the Moor’s head] from the shoulders of a vast Pagan” (1). The uncertainty surrounding which forefather performed the violence does not weaken Orlando’s identity; rather, the narrator’s allusion to Orlando’s genealogy acts as a stabilizing mechanism. Orlando emerges in Orlando less as an autonomous individual than as a continuation of an aristocratic order that long precedes him. Indeed, Orlando repeats the inherited violence of his “lord” ancestors by continuing to “slice at” the Moor’s severed head generations later (1). This continuity materializes spatially through the “gigantic house,” which operates as an extension of the permanence of Orlando’s aristocratic lineage. Orlando’s opening paragraph appears to foreground instability in gendered appearance, yet its deeper concerns lie in class and lineage, perhaps even in Orlando’s masculinity as a performance of his class and lineage. Woolf uses Orlando’s aristocratic continuity to establish him as indubitably intelligible before she destabilizes his sex. 

Published in 1928, the novel documents Orlando’s experience as he traverses centuries, changes sex midway through the narrative, yet nevertheless maintains a continuity of consciousness across historical transformation. Much of the narrative takes place in England, and the novel takes its start in the Elizabethan era. Orlando then bears witness to the Restoration and Victorian periods; eventually, the narrative segues into the twentieth century while continuing to refuse the ordinary logic of historical development. 

Woolf collapses binary after binary in writing this novel. Biography dissolves into fantasy, historical chronicle into theatrical parody. The novel’s instability has generated a corresponding instability in its own critical reception. As feminist critic Victoria Smith asks, “What is Orlando? Is she a woman? If so, how can she be represented?”[i] These questions extend beyond Orlando as a character toward the form of the text itself. Is Orlando [CSA5] biography, autobiography, fantasy, satire, love letter, or some unstable mixture of all five at once? Woolf’s refusal of generic stability mirrors the novel’s refusal of stable sexual identity. 

Much of the criticism surrounding Orlando has approached the novel as a meditation on the impossibility of fixing gender into coherent representational form. The novel has also been read as Woolf’s own theory of sexuality. Smith argues that the novel’s “impossible story” of a protagonist changing from man to woman while living for centuries reflects a broader crisis of representation itself, namely the difficulty of representing “woman” as a stable category within language and literary form. Orlando’s shifting pronouns and resistance to fixed labeling have made the novel central to feminist and queer readings of Woolf. Critics highlight the text’s dismantling of sexual essentialism, the idea that human sexuality is fixed rather than fluid or socially constructed.[ii] Esther Sánchez-Pardo González, a critic specializing in modernism and psychoanalysis, posits that, in Orlando, “the change of sex does not involve a change of gender,” since gender throughout the novel emerges as a social construct, or as a performative act.[iii]Orlando’s movement between masculine and feminine social roles exposes gender as a learned performance. Orlando thus can be read as an anticipation of Judith Butler’s later theory of gender performativity.[iv] González  later argues that sexual boundaries are effaced throughout the novel as Woolf reaches “the neutralization of sex.”[v] Orlando has consequently been understood as one of modernism’s most ambitious fantasies of androgynous subjectivity. 

These critical readings rightly illuminate an essential aspect of the novel---that Orlando challenges conservative norms pertaining to gender and sexuality. Yet the novel’s progressivism depends upon a continuity that criticism has often treated as secondary. The question animating criticism to come should not be simply how Woolf destabilizes gender, but why that destabilization never threatens Orlando’s continuity as a subject. The protagonist’s movement across gender categories occurs alongside a remarkable stability of estate, lineage, and historical visibility. Woolf does not transcend social structure to ensure that Orlando’s identity remains narratively coherent; rather, aristocratic continuity fixes the character’s identity beneath their bodily change.

If Orlando’s fluidity depends on continuity, then we must look to the historical conditions that produced that fantasy of continuity. Woolf made it clear that Orlando was rooted in the life of her lover Vita Sackville-West, whose aristocratic inheritance forms the historical precondition for the novel’s treatment of gender and continuity alike. Woolf wrote in her diary:

"I am writing Orlando half in mock style very clear & plain, so that people will understand every word. But the balance between truth and fantasy must be careful. It is based on Vita, Violet Trefusis, Lord Lascelles, Knole &c."[vi] 

Woolf’s diary entry is striking for the way it places Knole, the Sackvilles’ ancestral estate in Kent, alongside Vita and other figures on whom the novel draws. In Orlando, Woolf reproduces the scale of Knole and the aristocratic prestige of the Sackvilles but rewrites the logic governing inheritance. The novel emerges from the historical fact that Vita, despite her ancestral connection to Knole, could not inherit the estate because she was female.[vii] The novel resolves Vita’s historical exclusion from aristocratic continuity by imagining an aristocratic subject whose identity survives sexual transformation without forfeiting their legal personhood.

Victoria Smith argues that Woolf symbolically restores Vita’s ego by allowing her to see herself refracted back in idealized literary form.[viii]In The Ego and the Id, Freud writes:

"The experiences of the ego seem at first to be lost for inheritance; but, when they have been repeated often enough and with sufficient strength in many individuals in successive generations, they often transform themselves, so to say, into experiences of the id, the impressions of which are preserved by heredity."[ix]

The ego forms itself through loss because the lost object becomes internalized and preserved psychically. Freud’s language of hereditary psychic continuity mirrors Orlando’s own obsession with genealogical continuity across generations, from the tradition of Moor-killing at the start of the novel to the persistence of Orlando’s estate in Orlando’s name across centuries, despite the character’s sex change. Smith is therefore correct that Orlando restores Vita’s ego at the level of psyche and symbolic representation; yet that restoration cannot be understood apart from the material structures organizing identity throughout the text. In this sense, it is worth reading Woolf’s restoration as more economic than psychic. “Economic” here does not simply denote literal money or wealth in the abstract. Knole is a structure of historical continuity itself, since it represents Orlando’s identity as landed gentry. This shift changes how the novel’s gender politics ought to be read. Orlando’s body changes while the structures rendering Orlando socially and historically legible remain intact. The true fantasy of the novel is therefore less radical than it appears at first blush. 

Something similar structures Woolf’s imagination in her earlier writings. In “Street Haunting: A London Adventure,” she conceives of an anonymous female narrator wandering the streets of London in search of a lead pencil. The essay stages a temporary reprieve from stable identity by centering a narrator who dissolves into urban multiplicity. “We shed the self our friends know us by,” Woolf writes, before later observing that “we are streaked, variegated, all of a mixture.”[x] Woolf’s fascination with anonymity and fluid selfhood here anticipates Orlando. The narrator of the essay tries on, so to speak, different lives and observes poverty from a distance, all the while transforming marginality into visual spectacle. Woolf lingers on a dwarf, blind men, the “hobbling grotesque dance,” the “bearded Jew.” [xi] Marginality serves as a fleeting image rather than a material condition. Woolf goes on to write, “Let us dally a little longer, be content with surfaces only.”[xii]She refuses social penetration here; Orlando similarly aestheticizes history, gender, and class without materially inhabiting instability. 

At the conclusion of “Street Haunting,” the narrator returns home. When Woolf narrates, “It is comforting to feel the old possessions, the old prejudices, fold us round,” it becomes clear that fluidity is pleasurable if and only if stability remains beneath it.[xiii]Here, “possessions” refers to the narrator’s property, their class continuity by extension. “Prejudices,” similarly, names the inherited ideology and upper-class worldview to which the wandering subject returns. Woolf quite clearly admits a return to the comfort of elite enclosure. Much like the narrator of “Street Haunting,” Orlando experiences identity as mobile and aesthetic while remaining protected by the possibility of return. The novel’s gender fluidity is therefore grounded in the security of class associated with aristocratic class position. 

When Orlando changes sex in Constantinople midway through the novel, Woolf presents the moment as one of theatrical revelation rather than existential rupture. As the narration goes, “He stood upright in complete nakedness before us, and while the trumpets pealed Truth! Truth! Truth! we have no choice left but confess---he was a woman” (137). The scene is absurdly overperformed---the repetition of “Truth!” recalls the novel’s opening paragraph’s anxious declaration that “there could be no doubt of his sex” (1). In both scenes, certainty appears most aggressively at the precise moment legibility becomes unstable. Woolf compensates for ambiguity here through theatrical proclamation, since the transformation is accompanied by a musical score and performed before a mirror, as though Orlando were both an actor performing for the reader and a spectator viewing himself on a stage. It follows that, in this scene, sex is spectacle rather than psychic catastrophe.[xiv]  

Sex as spectacle tugs at Butler’s theory of gender performativity. It is tempting to read Orlando through the lens of this theory in scenes where Woolf foregrounds costume and theatricality as constitutive of identity itself. For instance, gender is made literal through the physicality of clothing when Archduchess [CSA11] Harriet reveals herself to be Archduke Harry. “A heap of clothes lay in the fender,” Woolf writes after Orlando discovers that “[Archduke Harry] had dressed as a woman” (178-9). Orlando’s transformation from man to woman does not become socially meaningful until skirts and convention begin to control the character’s body. 

Sex changes in Constantinople, but gender change occurs only when Orlando is aboard a ship leaving the Constantinople:[xv]

"It was not until she felt the coil of skirts about her legs and the Captain offered, with the greatest politeness, to have an awning spread for her on deck that she realized, with a start the penalties and privileges of her position." (153)

The “coil of skirts” signifies more than mere gender performativity. The reader is told that “up to this moment [Orlando] had scarcely given her sex a thought,” but once she dons “such clothes as women then wore,” she suddenly becomes vulnerable to the forms of chivalric condescension and social limitation that had previously remained external to her experience (153). The “coil of skirts” materializes an entire social system of etiquette and classed behavioral expectation. Woolf treats costume as an essential layer of identity, as evidenced by the novel’s opening sentence, where “the fashion of the time did something to disguise” Orlando’s sex (1). Clothing operates as a mechanism through which social intelligibility is organized. 

The performance of gender is inseparable from class. The narrator explicitly reassures the reader that “the change of sex, though it altered [Orlando’s] future, did nothing whatever to alter their identity” (138). This statement markedly reveals where instability does not reside. Orlando’s body changes, but the structures that render Orlando legible to the social world in which the character resides---namely, lineage, wealth, and narrative centrality---these remain secure. Orlando can move between masculine and feminine presentation because the character’s aristocratic status remains stable beneath their costume. 

Orlando’s stint with the gypsies clarifies the extent to which the character’s gender fluidity depends upon this kind of classed continuity. Among the gypsies, Orlando temporarily escapes English social conventions---more specifically, the English aristocratic etiquette and rigid gender conventions. Kirstie Blair, a scholar of Victorian literature and culture, notes that the gypsies occupy a kind of “sexless” social position within the novel.[xvi] The gypsies are part and parcel of Woolf’s fantasy of homelessness and erotic freedom outside English society.[xvii]Just as the narrator of “Street Haunting” must eventually return to her home, Orlando cannot remain among the gypsies for eternity. Woolf’s biography must go on. The failure does not lie in cultural misunderstanding; Orlando’s aristocratic identity proves inescapable. 

Notably, the primary ‘spat’ between the gypsies, none of whom are named individually in the narrative, and Orlando is contained by the following dialogue:

“Four hundred and seventy-six bedrooms mean nothing to them,” sighed Orlando. 

“She prefers a sunset to a flock of goats,” said the Gipsies. 

What was to be done, Orlando could not think. To leave the gipsies and become once more an Ambassador seemed to her intolerable. But it was equally impossible to remain fore ever where there was neither ink nor writing paper, neither reverence for the Talbots, nor respect for a multiplicity of bedrooms (149-50).

Bedrooms imply house, house implies estate, estate implies ancestry, and ancestry implies the continuity of the Talbot name across generations. Orlando is not irritated that the gypsies do not admire wealth. The offense is that they do not recognize the symbolic order through which Orlando understands personhood. To them, the bedrooms “mean nothing”; to Orlando, they mean everything, because they symbolize inheritance and historical permanence. A “multiplicity of bedrooms,” a term that recalls the “gigantic house” of Orlando’s childhood, becomes the absurd object that reveals class consciousness. Orlando can imagine rejecting ambassadorship, English etiquette, even fixed gender convention, but cannot imagine remaining in a world without “reverence for the Talbots” or “respect” for inherited property. The gypsies therefore expose the limits of the novel’s fantasy of liberation. They reveal just how deeply Orlando’s identity depends upon the very English structures which it claims to forsake. 

The failure of escape is not limited to the gypsy episode; it describes the novel’s relation to history more broadly. Orlando enters spaces, costumes, peoples, and historical periods that are more than capable of transforming the character, yet these encounters rarely alter the conditions of Orlando’s identity. Orlando occupies a strange relationship to the historical novel as Georg Lukács defines it. For Lukács, the historical novel produces characters whose consciousness merges from material contradictions of their historical moment.[xviii]Individuals are shaped by the economic structures they inhabit, the political turbulence they experience, and the social upheaval they witness---this is broadly true of the human experience. Orlando resembles the historical novel formally insofar as it documents centuries of English national history and situates its protagonist alongside recognizable literary and political figures, ranging from Shakespeare to Pope and Tennyson.

Orlando is a historical biography in which history fails to historicize the protagonist. The novel continually gestures toward historical specificity, be it Elizabethan England or the twentieth century, yet these periods resemble theatrical sets more than distinct social worlds. History appears as decorative atmosphere: a succession of costumes, settings, literary styles, and shifting aesthetic moods that Orlando traverses largely unchanged. Woolf renders historical periods through an aesthetic shorthand in her prose, such as Restoration society through excess and ornament, Victorian culture through an emphasis on propriety, modernity through speed. These eras are not depicted as full of political conflict or economic transformation; they are instead stylized moods through which Orlando drifts. 

Woolf rejects the logic of historical determination so near and dear to Lukács’ model of the historical novel. Orlando remains both psychologically and socially continuous across centuries. The protagonist encounters history as a visual texture rather than as a structure that determines their lived reality. The novel spans centuries that saw enormous transformation in England---imperial expansion, the rise of Protestantism, the mass adoption of capitalism, industrial revolutions of both the first and second order, to name a few---yet these forces never penetrate Orlando’s life deeply enough to remake the character’s identity. Orlando’s mobility therefore depends not upon liberation from history, but upon a class position so secure that it turns history into an aesthetic rather than a material force. Labor, dispossession, economic precarity, social upheaval---these are the conditions that typically structure historical consciousness. Orlando remains insulated from them.

Such insulation is both thematic and formal. If Orlando loosens the conventional categories of gender, chronology, and genre, it does not loosen all boundaries equally. The novel’s radical play with binaries depends upon a highly controlled economy of attention. Some lives are made narratable, while others appear only as passing surfaces. The novel participates in what Jacques Rancière calls a “distribution of the sensible.” By this term, Rancière refers to a literary organization of visibility that determines which lives become perceptible and historically meaningful. For Rancière, literature is political because it organizes what may be seen, spoken, and remembered. As he writes: 

"Politics revolves around what is seen and what can be said about it, around who has the ability to see and the talent to speak, around the properties of spaces and the possibilities of time."[xix]

On the surface, Orlando seems to participate in this democratic redistribution of perception.  Woolf unsettles hierarchies that ordinarily govern identity and genre in precisely the way Rancière identifies with the modern aesthetic regime.[xx]The novel appears to expand the terms of visibility by refusing to keep Orlando in a single temporal setting or geographical location. Yet the novel’s redistribution of visibility remains uneven despite its participation in the modern aesthetic regime. 

Take the servants, sailors, gypsies, even the Moor at the novel’s opening as examples. These characters emerge briefly before disappearing back into the curtains of narrative obscurity. They are just visible enough to adorn Orlando’s world, but rarely for long enough to acquire narrative duration. Orlando, by contrast, receives centuries of narrative continuity. Despite abandoning Orlando toward the start of the novel, Sasha appears again and again in the narrative through the vehicle of Orlando’s memory. Even the poet Nick Greene is granted narrative continuity. Orlando therefore preserves hierarchy at the level where it appears most radically democratic---the allocation of narrative attention itself.

This uneven distribution of attention reveals the larger ideological contradiction of Orlando. The novel’s form is radically destabilizing, but the social structure that underwrites that destabilization remains materially conservative. As Marxist critic Terry Eagleton argues, “The true bearers of ideology in art are the very forms, rather than the abstractable content, of the work itself.”[xxi] Orlando’s politics, then, cannot be located solely in its explicit treatment of gender, sexuality, or even androgyny. Its ideology emerges most forcefully in the formal arrangement that allows Orlando to become mutable without ever becoming dispossessed. 

At first glance, Orlando appears almost infinitely mobile. The novel acknowledges the legal and social restrictions attached to femininity, but it neutralizes their consequences through Orlando’s inherited wealth and lineage. Orlando may become female, but the character never ceases to belong, whether to a house, a lineage, a national history, or their society. This distinction is essential. Woolf can imagine freedom from gender because she has already held freedom from economic strife as constant. 

Lukács claims that “the truly social element in literature is the form.”[xxii]  In Orlando, form both liberates and conceals. Woolf’s experimentation gives the semblance of revolution because it destabilizes the visible signs of identity. It leaves untouched the deeper conditions that determine who may survive such destabilization. Orlando can, in all senses of the word, afford fluidity because Orlando is never forced into unreadability. The novel’s deep-seated fantasy, then, is not as it may seem---that one may change genders and live for centuries. It is that one might change so fundamentally and still remain institutionally recognizable. Beneath the gleam and gloss of radical fluidity, Orlando preserves a more conservative dream: that aristocratic continuity may survive every assault of time, sex, history, and even form.  

ENDNOTES 

[i] Victoria L. Smith, “‘Ransacking the Language’: Finding the Missing Goods in Virginia Woolf’s ‘Orlando,’” Journal of Modern Literature 29, no. 4 (2006): 58, JSTOR. 

[ii] Christy L. Burns, “Re-Dressing Feminist Identities: Tensions between Essential and Constructed Selves in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando,” Twentieth Century Literature 40, no. 3 (1994): 342–64, JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/441560.

[iii] Esther Sánchez-Pardo González, “‘What Phantasmagoria the Mind Is’: Reading Virginia Woolf’s Parody of Gender,” Atlantis 26, no. 2 (2004): 84, JSTOR.

[iv] Woolf and Butler’s views on the relation between sex and gender share a common theoretical ground. As Butler argues, gender is a social practice and thus is not prior to what she calls subjectivation. In Butler’s introduction to their 1993 essay titled “Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex,” they write, “subjected to gender but subjectivated by gender, the ‘I’ neither precedes nor follows the process of this gendering, but emerges only within and as a matrix of gender relations themselves.” See also Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (Routledge, 1990) for their theory of gender performativity.

[v] González, “‘What Phantasmagoria the Mind Is’: Reading Virginia Woolf’s Parody of Gender,” 83.

[vi] Virginia Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, vol. 3, ed. Anne Olivier Bell (Granta, October 22, 1927). Vita Sackville-West was Woolf’s lover and the primary model for Orlando. Violet Trefusis was Sackville-West’s childhood-friend-turned-lover. Their affair continued into both of their respective marriages. Critics agree that Woolf created Sasha’s character with Trefusis in mind. See Kirstie Blair’s 2004 article “Gypsies and Lesbian Desire: Vita Sackville-West, Violet Trefusis, and Virginia Woolf” for more information regarding this ‘love triangle,’ for lack of a better term.

[vii] Instead, the Knole estate went to a distant uncle.

[viii] Smith, “‘Ransacking the Language’: Finding the Missing Goods in Virginia Woolf’s ‘Orlando,’” 64. 

[ix] Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id, ed. James Strachey, trans. Joan Riviere (1923; W. W. Norton & Company, 1960), 35.

[x] Virginia Woolf, Street Haunting: A London Adventure (The Yale Review, 1927).

[xi] Ibid.

[xii] Ibid. 

[xiii] Ibid.

[xiv] Freud frames sexual difference through the language of lack. In his 1931 paper titled “Female Sexuality,” he writes that “when the little girl discovers her own deficiency, from seeing a male genital, it is only with hesitation and reluctance that she accepts the unwelcome knowledge.” Orlando, by contrast, barely reacts. When first observing his change of sex, “[Orlando] looked himself up and down in a long looking-glass, without showing any signs of discomposure, and went, presumably, to his bath” (138). Woolf resists Freud’s theory of female sexuality and drains this moment of any sort of existential terror. It has since been shown that Freud did not understand female sexuality very well, as evidenced by his assertion that the clitoral orgasm pales in comparison to the vaginal orgasm. 

[xv] I refer to Orlando using the pronoun “he” before the Constantinople sex change; “they” after the sex change but before their departure from Constantinople; and “she” after the character adopts female fashion aboard the ship departing Constantinople.

[xvi] Kirstie Blair, “Gypsies and Lesbian Desire: Vita Sackville-West, Violet Trefusis, and Virginia Woolf,” Twentieth Century Literature 50, no. 2 (2004): 141, JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/4149276.

[xvii] See “Street Haunting” for Woolf’s fixation on anonymity. It is also of note that Vita Sackville-West was known to have a gypsy-fixation and wrote on her fantasy of a nomadic lifestyle among the gypsies. See Blair’s article in the above note for more information on Vita and her gypsy fetish.

[xviii] Georg Lukács, The Historical Novel, trans. Hannah Mitchell (Merlin Press Limited, 1962).

[xix] Jacques Rancière, “The Distribution of the Sensible,” in The Politics of Aesthetics (Continuum International Pub Group, 2004), 13.

[xx] Rancière, “The Distribution of the Sensible,” 23.

[xxi] Terry Eagleton, Marxism and Literary Criticism (University of California Press, 1976), 24.

[xxii] Lukács, The Historical Novel. 

FURTHER READING

Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex. Routledge, 1993.

Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble. Routledge, 1990.

Daileader, Celia R. Caputi. “Othello’s Sister: Racial Hermaphroditism and Appropriation in Virginia Woolf’s ‘Orlando.’” Studies in the Novel 45, no. 1 (2013): 56–79. JSTOR.

Farwell, Marilyn R. “Virginia Woolf and Androgyny.” Contemporary Literature 16, no. 4 (1975): 433–51. JSTOR. https://doi.org/10.2307/1207610.

Freud, Sigmund. “Female Sexuality.” In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 21. W. W. Norton & Company, 1931.

Hoovey, Jaime. “Kissing a Negress in the Dark: Englishness as a Masquerade in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando.” PMLA 2, no. 118 (2003).

Lawrence, Karen R. “Orlando’s Voyage Out.” In Virginia Woolf: Emerging Perspectives, edited by Mark Hussey and Vara Neverow-Turk. Pace University Press, 1994.

Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. Harvard University Press, 1992.

Phillips, Kathy J. Virginia Woolf against Empire. University of Tennessee Press, 1994.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. Columbia University Press, 1985.

Seshagiri, Urmila. “Orienting Virginia Woolf: Race, Aesthetics, and Politics in To the Lighthouse.” Modern Fiction Studies 50, no. 4 (2004): 794–813.