Colouring the Past
Death, Desire and Homosexuality in Vernon Lee's 'A Wedding Chest'
in Volume 19 (2007): Issue 1 (Mar 2007): A History of Her Own: History and the Modernist Woman Writer. Guest Editors: Mark Llewellyn and Ann Heilmann
Earlier, in 1928, Virginia Woolf had conducted a literary exploration into such transformations of gender in her novel Orlando: A Biography inspired by the sapphic charms and aristocratic history of her friend and lover Vita Sackville-West.2 In Woolf ’s text, the eponymous protagonist experiences a series of time slips that coincide with comparable shifts in sex. In his essay ‘The Forest Beyond the Frame: Picturing Women’s Desires in Vernon Lee and Virginia Woolf’, Dennis Denisoff demonstrates the unacknowledged influence of Vernon Lee on Woolf’s Orlando.
