Abstract
In her life-writing texts, Virginia Woolf uses and advances Sackville-West’s narratological methods in her presentation of the lesbian. Woolf’s fantastical “biography” Orlando (1928), for example, uses Sackville-West’s tools of counterfeit rhetoric and palimpsest to create a “biography” that seems to comply with expectations of a heterosexual culture and conventional biography, but which provides a positive portrayal of the lesbian. Like Sackville-West, Woolf also uses the sexological tenets of lesbian identification—yet, unlike Sackville-West, she mocks them, rather than instantiating them.
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© 2007 Georgia Johnston
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Johnston, G. (2007). Virginia Woolf’s Subjectivities and (Auto)biographies. In: The Formation of 20th-Century Queer Autobiography. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-12128-8_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-12128-8_4
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-73784-0
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-12128-8
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