Virginia Woolf's 1928 historical fantasy Orlando has assumed a central place within an Anglo-American literary tradition of representations of motifs of ‘gender crossing’ and ‘changing sex’. The eponymous protagonist is famously transformed from a man into a woman midway through a narrative which opens in the Elizabethan era and closes in 1928; the narrator's bold and playful insistence that 'in every other respect, Orlando remained precisely as he had been' exemplifies a challenge to conventional ideas about the relationship between sex and gender which has inspired subsequent generations of writers and critics. Indeed, some of the formative features of the treatment of transgender motifs in the literary imagination can be found in this novel. Firstly, it arguably helped to establish historical fiction and fantasy fiction as genres providing ‘natural’ homes for transgender characters or themes, which are often imagined as belonging to a bygone era or to a speculative future. Secondly, Woolf's narrative provides an important precedent for the figurative use of transgender as a conceptual conceit: that is, as a metaphorical vehicle for the exploration of abstract questions to do with identity. Finally, the legacy of Orlando has served to shape a particular relationship between transgender motifs, women's writing and feminist literary criticism, including in narratives which explore gender crossing as a form of feminist subversion (such as Patricia Duncker's James Miranda Barry) or which critique the cultural construction of femininity (such as Angela Carter's The Passion of New Eve). By contrast, George Moore's 1918 novella Albert Nobbs - published a decade before Orlando - has received much less critical attention than Woolf 's extensively analysed fiction. Set in a Dublin hotel in the 1860s, it explores the repercussions of an encounter between two working men, hotel waiter Albert Nobbs and housepainter Hubert Page. The accidental revelation of Albert's sex to his temporary roommate prompts a disclosure by Hubert that he too is a femalebodied man; Hubert's accounts of his contented domestic life with his wife Polly inspire Albert to transform his own social and marital status, and his attempts to do so are central to the drama which subsequently unfolds. Moore's novella merits close and sustained critical attention for a number of reasons.