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 iconAs 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). Our fey protagonist simply frolics through the centuries, ever entranced by poetry, romance and nature, even as their embodiment and larger world dramatically evolve. Despite its conspicuous trans narrative, and remarkably modern vision of gender fluidity, Orlando was published long before our present understandings of transness. A charismatic shapeshifter, Orlando is today a nonbinary or genderqueer icon – but those concepts did not exist in the 1920s. The original text did, however, emerge from a larger interrogation of gender in Woolf’s mature work. Written alongside her germinal 1929 essay A Room of One’s Own, where Woolf skewered sexual double standards in the arts, Orlando can be read as a feminist interrogation of gender roles and their artificial constraints. By following our hero across the male–female binary, the story exposes how the same person will have a very different experience of the world, according to their perceived gender. Orlando shows how the same person will have a very different experience of the world, depending on whether they’re seen as male or female. Helvetiq Ultimate shapeshifterThe story of Orlando is nothing if not the ultimate shapeshifter. It shifts medium as readily as the character of Orlando switches gender. This latest iteration follows Paul Preciado’s 2023 documentary Orlando: My Political Biography; a 2015 ballet, Woolf Works; a 2021 Fendi collection – and Sally Potter’s acclaimed 1992 film adaption, starring Tilda Swinton. Kuhlendahl’s interpretation joins a growing suite of gender-bending graphic novels. This includes Maia Kobabe’s Gender Queer (2019), Alice Oseman’s Heartstopper series (2016-), Alison Bechdel’s work, and Lee Lai’s Stone Fruit (2021) and Cannon (2025) — the latter of which won this year’s Stella Prize. It’s almost as if there’s something a little queer about graphic storytelling, lending it to LGBTQIA+ narratives. This goes back to popular newspaper comics of the early 1900s. Hard to fault ‘as summary or homage’As graphic novels and LGBTQIA+ fiction have boomed, along with queer book clubs and literary festivals, a graphic version of Orlando feels almost inevitable. It capitalises on Woolf’s brand power (and copyright-free content) alongside contemporary market trends, within an otherwise pressured literary ecosystem. But this sense of inevitability also keeps Kuhlendahl’s version from flying as a standalone creation. Lacking a new interpretation or urgent message, the graphic novel struggles to beguile on its own terms. Above all an accessible summary, it’s valuable largely as a signpost back to the original text. That said, as summary or homage, Kuhlendahl’s Orlando is hard to fault. Easily consumed in a single sitting, the graphic novel provides an effective distillation of the original, with vibrant illustrations that evoke the madcap exuberance of Woolf’s storytelling by refusing the confines of the comic panel. For readers new to Orlando’s capers, or disinclined to tackle the novel’s ornate prose, this version provides an entrée to a trans icon who long predates the so-called “transgender tipping point” of 2014 – a moment heralded as a paradigm shift in trans visibility and representation. Indeed, revisiting Orlando in graphic form reminds us its queerness extends far beyond a single moment of male-to-female transition. Rather, the narrative is littered with gender-bending capers and queer love, from the gender disguise of Archduchess Harriet (actually an Archduke), to the Orlando’s effeminate male lover Shel, and Orlando’s own repeated back-and-forth between petticoats and breeches. Indeed, when it comes to clothes and gender performance, we’d be forgiven for thinking Woolf had already read Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble (1990), not published until a half century after her death: Different though the sexes are, they intermix. Often it is only the clothes that keep the male or female likeness; underneath, the sex is opposite to what is above. Orlando is littered with gender-bending capers and queer love. Helvetiq Remarkable absence of shame or angstMost remarkable is the absence of shame or angst around all this queerness. There is no attempt to explain or sanitise; simply a merry hedonism that refuses to apologise for itself. We learn that, as a woman in the 18th century, “Orlando enjoyed the love of both sexes equally” and “fled with a certain lady to the Low Countries”. By swapping outfits and lovers, she “increased the pleasures of life and multiplied its experiences”.This cheerful subversion could not be further removed from the grim “inverts” of Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness, another LGBTQIA+ classic, also published in 1928. Even now, in 2026, there remains an arresting freshness to Woolf’s vision of queer plenitude. More pleasure, more outfits, more experiences: who could object? In whatever form it takes, Orlando is an enduring paean to queer joy. Today, the optimism of the trans tipping point is giving way to conservative backlash and the Lemkin Institute, a non-governmental organisation dedicated to ending genocide, has raised concerns about the Trump administration’s attempted genocide of trans people in the United States.Given all this, we need that joy wherever we can find it.Yves Rees does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.