Historian

D’Eon: The Wonder of Her Sex

A spy who became a celebrity.

A diplomat between superpowers.

A trans woman who presented as a man for fifty years.

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Advance Praise

In this wonderfully vivid study we enter an eighteenth-century labyrinth of mirrors, in which the boundaries of sex/gender are blurred and then refracted through espionage, intrigue and courtly adventure. Conlin reminds us of the timeless complexity and elusiveness of identity.

Gina Gwenffrewi, University of Edinburgh
By far the best, most humane and deeply-researched account we have of the most 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
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