The sexually liberating nature of Orlando's homage to Daniel Defoe - and the realistic novel he fathered - lies in the fact that to challenge the constraints of the literary canon is to confront the deepest politics or philosophy linking gender to genre. The eighteenth-century fathers of the novel adhered to a strictly referential use of language, corollary to the commitment to formal realism which aligned them with the realist philosophers. That this linguistic probity had moral and cultural ramifications for them was most tellingly expressed in Locke's observation, in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding, that 'eloquence, like the fair sex, involves a pleasurable deceit'. In allusions to a variety of unorthodox marriages, 'The Jessamy Brides' not only embodies the disobedient briskness which Virginia Woolf admired in Moll Flanders, but it replicates Woolf's own defiance of social conventions in her love affair with Vita Sackville-West.