“By far the best, most humane and deeply-researched account we have of the celebrated personality of the age of Enlightenment and Revolution, who was baptised a boy but thought otherwise.”

colin jones, author of Madame de Pompadour: Images of a Mistress and The Shortest History of France

"In one of the most important European eighteenth-century trans narratives, Conlin does not steer away from the complexities that made d'Eon's identity possible: political plots, celebrity culture, and forgery. All were conducive to a story of self-fashioning we need now more than ever.”

m.a. miller, Washington State University

“In this wonderfully vivid study by Conlin of the historical trans figure of D'Eon, we enter an eighteenth-century world of mirrors and labyrinths, in which the boundaries of sex/gender are blurred and then refracted through espionage, intrigue and courtly adventure. As if Woolf's Orlando were made flesh, Conlin's D'Eon reminds us of the timeless complexity of identity and its elusiveness, for a contemporary audience too often lectured on its immutability and fixedness.”

Gina Gwenffrewi, Co-Director of SUISS at the University of Edinburgh