The Biography of a Face: Virginia Woolf's Orlando

Abstract: Virginia Woolf's novel Orlando: A Biography can best be described as a literary portrait. Woolf draws a portrait of the titular character—a composite of literary and visual artworks—as perpetually youthful. Through this portrait, the novel traces a change in the history of the physiognomic face in modernity—from Orlando's memorable face-to-face with Queen Elizabeth to her search for meaning in the faces around her in London in 1928. The face of Orlando, which Woolf forcefully inserts into the history of the portrait, is sketched in a formal relation to absent faces in the history of portraiture—women's faces and racialized faces. An engagement with Paul Mpagi Sepuya's recent photographic reflections on Orlando reveals the version of modernist queerness dramatized by the novel to be mediated by racial difference.