Published in 1928, Orlando is a novel that “mimics” the apparatus of a conventional biography. In addition to the reference to “A Biography” on the title page, it has a preface, an index and eight illustrations. This mimicry caused problems with booksellers in the time leading up to publication: some shops refused to order more than half a dozen copies of the novel on the grounds that “biographies” did not sell. Woolf lamented in her diary that she was going to have to pay “a high price for the fun of calling it a biography”. Such worries, however, proved to be unfounded. Although the opinion of contemporary critics was mixed, the novel itself was a great success.
Woolf had a particular interest in the genre of biography. Her father, Sir Leslie Stephen, was one of the founding editors of the monumental Dictionary of National Biography (1885-1903). Her friend Lytton Strachey was the author of the scandalous and highly successful Eminent Victorians (1918) and Queen Victoria (1921). Woolf herself wrote two biographies, Flush (1933) and Roger Fry (1940), plus a number of short biographical sketches and several important essays on the genre, including “The New Biography” (1927).
In Orlando Woolf makes use of a “self-aware” fictional narrator, the “biographer”, who appears from time to time to comment, often humorously, on the process of writing a biography. This self-analysis of the narrative, by the narrative, gives Orlando a more than passing resemblance to the genre of “metafiction”. Questions about what constitutes “the proper stuff” of biography are a recurring motif in the novel. A number of “unexplainable” incidents occur: they are usually connected with a lack of “documentary” evidence. Woolf uses these incidents to draw the reader's attention to the fact that all biographies are only ever one, incomplete, version of the “truth”. The line between fiction and biography is blurred; the narrator admits, “often it has been necessary to speculate, to surmise, and even use the imagination”. Full of complexity, strangeness and subversive humour, Orlando asks important questions about the nature of genre, gender, sexuality, society and history. It is also very funny.
Orlando is “inspired” by the life of Vita Sackville-West (1892–1962). The novel is dedicated to her and she appears in three of its illustrations (“Orlando on her Return to England”, “Orlando About the Year 1840” and “Orlando at the Present Time”). Vita Sackville-West was born at Knole, near Sevenoaks in Kent: a grand, sprawling house that had been in the hands of the Sackville family since the middle of the sixteenth century. In the 1920s Sackville-West established a reputation for herself as a successful poet, novelist and broadcaster (her books consistently outsold those of Woolf's). Woolf and Sackville-West met in December 1922. Despite some early reservations, their friendship quickly blossomed: by December 1925 it had developed into a love-affair (Sackville-West was married to the author and diplomat Harold Nicolson, they enjoyed what would be called today an “open marriage”: he would have affairs with men; she, usually, with other women). Orlando is written in the cool autumn of Woolf and Sackville-West's affair (by late 1927, Sackville-West had started an affair with another woman, Mary Campbell). Though Woolf and Sackville-West remained good friends for the rest of Woolf's life, there is a suggestion of jealousy and “revenge” in Woolf's fictional portrait of her lover (at one point, Woolf writes to Sackville-West to warn her: “If you've given yourself to Campbell, I'll have no more to do with you, and so it shall be written, plainly, for all the world to read in Orlando”).
Woolf began writing Orlando in October 1927. She made swift progress; by the following March she wrote to Sackville-West to tell her it was finished (Woolf bombarded Sackville-West with a multitude of questions while she was writing Orlando, but she did not allow her to read any of the manuscript). The pace at which Woolf wrote her novel is in marked contrast with the writing of the two novels either side of Orlando, To the Lighthouse (1927) and The Waves (1931), both of which took several years to compose. Woolf was unsure what to make of the finished product, she felt it was “too long for a joke, & too frivolous for a serious book”. She was pleasantly surprised, therefore, when her husband Leonard Woolf took it “more seriously than [she] had expected”. Nigel Nicolson, one of Vita Sackville-West's sons, has called Orlando “the longest and most charming love-letter in literature”. Sackville-West herself wrote to Woolf on the day Orlando was published to say that she was “completely dazzled, bewitched, enchanted [and] under a spell”. Sackville-West adds that the novel has had an unexpected effect: “you have invented a new form of Narcissism, – I confess, – I am in love with Orlando”.
Unusually, for Woolf, Orlando has a “plot”, of sorts. However, it must be noted that this “plot” is really subordinate to the sheer joy of the writing itself: a summary of what “happens” in the novel necessarily misses much of its poetry and allusion (for one thing, Orlando spends a great deal of time reading, writing and thinking; a circumstance that at one point leaves the narrator, bereft of anything whatsoever to describe, blankly reciting the months of the year). The novel begins in the middle of the sixteenth century, during the reign of Queen Elizabeth. Orlando, a sixteen year old nobleman, is prone to dreaming and absent-mindedness; he is rich and exceptionally good looking; and, most crucially of all, he wants to be a writer. Orlando attends the court of James I at the time of “The Great Frost”. After a succession of doomed fiancées, he meets and hopelessly falls in love with a Russian princess, Sasha (only for her to abandon him on the night they plan to run away together). He persuades Charles II to appoint him “Ambassador Extraordinary to Constantinople”. Once there, “he” becomes a woman. Orlando leaves Constantinople and lives as a gypsy before returning to the London of “Addison, Dryden [and] Pope”. She slowly adjusts to her new “role” in society. In the nineteenth century, after falling and breaking her ankle, she meets, falls in love, goes to bed with and then marries Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine, Esquire (whose “life was spent in the most desperate of adventures – which is to voyage round Cape Horn in the teeth of a gale”). On entering the twentieth century, her life fragments into thousands of different voices, different selves. She gives birth to a son; and wins a prize for her poem, “The Oak Tree”, which she has been writing, on and off, since 1586. The novel ends with Orlando a thirty-six year old woman; its final words ring out “the twelfth stroke of midnight, Thursday, the eleventh of October, Nineteen hundred and Twenty Eight” (the very day Orlando was published).
One point worth noting is that the style and content of both Orlando's poem, “The Oak Tree”, and the main narrative itself, change in tune with the movements in English literature from century to century (there are, for example, glimpses of Renaissance diction in chapter one, a more overt usage of Augustan phraseology in chapter four, some wonderfully high-blown Victorianism in chapter five and a Woolfian “stream-of-consciousness” narrative at the close of chapter six). As well as Woolf and Sackville-West's own works, the novel also parodies and satirises numerous other writers (far too many to mention here). Orlando can be read as a very rewarding, and strangely informative, tongue-in-cheek romp through the history of modern English literature.
Clothes are used as a signifier of gender ambiguity throughout the book. In the opening sentence of the novel “the fashion of the time did something to disguise” Orlando's sex; just as, when he first sees Sasha, Orlando is unsure whether he is watching a man or a woman because “the loose tunic and trousers of the Russian fashion served to disguise the sex”. To begin with, therefore, because she is living with the androgynously attired gypsies, Orlando does not really take notice of her abrupt change of sex. It is only when she embarks on a ship bound for England, wearing “a complete outfit of such clothes as women then wore”, that the full impact of the matter makes itself plain: “it was not until she felt the coil of skirts about her legs and the Captain offered, with the greatest politeness, to have an awning spread for her on deck, that she realised with a start the penalties and privileges of her position”. This sets in motion, naturally enough, a long meditation on what it means, exactly, to be “a woman”. Some time later she reaches the conclusion: “Different though the sexes are, they intermix. In every human being a vacillation from one sex to the other takes place, and often it is only the clothes that keep the male and female likeness, while underneath the sex is the very opposite of what it is above.”
What Woolf called in her diary “a change about from one sex to another” opens up into a comical-but-serious examination of the role of women in historical and contemporary society: a project she would continue in A Room of One's Own (1929). After she becomes a woman, Orlando sees the folly of much of her behaviour as a man; and, because she has once been a man, her present situation now serves to highlight the quite unreasonable expectations that men appear to have imposed upon women through the ages. Quite subtly, and with great humour, the arbitrary and “unnatural” status of gender roles is exposed. The presentation of gender in Orlando can be summed up as an anticipation of the argument Simone de Beauvoir would later put forward in The Second Sex (1949): “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman. No biological, psychological, or economic fate determines the figure that the human female presents in society; it is civilization as a whole that produces this creature”.
One particularly interesting question raised by Orlando's change of sex is the question of sexuality. In a diary entry that prefigures both Orlando and The Waves, Woolf describes her plan for a book entitled “The Jessamy Brides”. One of its key features, she notes, is that ”Sapphism is to be suggested”. Writing about same-sex desire in England in the 1920s was not something that one did lightly. Critics frequently make the link between Orlando and another “Sapphic novel” published in 1928, Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness. Hall's novel, notoriously and shamefully, was banned for “obscenity” (seemingly on account of the line, “and that night they were not divided”, which refers to the nocturnal activities of its two female protagonists). The prosecution of The Well of Loneliness spoke volumes about the misogyny and patriarchal bias of early twentieth-century British society. Even Woolf's own friends were not immune. She noted in her diary that the novelist E. M. Forster (who was, incidentally, homosexual), “thought Sapphism disgusting: partly from convention, partly because he disliked that women should be independent of men”. But the fact remained, as Woolf was moved to point out in A Room of One's Own (written in the aftermath of the Well of Loneliness trial), “sometimes women do like women”.
The Well of Loneliness is written in an overtly “realist” style. This allowed Hall's intended audience to decode her message with ease, but it also left her novel dangerously open to attack. Woolf, on the other hand, weaves her subject matter through an intricate web of fantasy, gender and word-play. Orlando is anything but direct. Woolf challenges the reader, mocks convention, and seems to ridicule the very idea that one could take offence at what is being said:
“Praise God that I'm a woman!” she cried, and was about to run into the extreme folly – than which none is more distressing in man or woman either – of being proud of her sex, when she paused over the singular word, which, for all we can do to put it in its place, has crept in at the end of the last sentence: Love. “Love”, said Orlando. Instantly – such is its impetuosity – love took a human shape – such is its pride. For where other thoughts are content to remain abstract, nothing will satisfy this one but to put on flesh and blood, mantilla and petticoats, hose and jerkin. And as all Orlando's loves had been women, now, through the culpable laggardry of the human frame to adapt itself to convention, though she herself was a woman, it was still a woman she loved; and if the consciousness of being of the same sex had any effect at all, it was to quicken and deepen those feelings which she had had as a man.
This passage is typical of the playful writing Woolf uses in Orlando: it jumps about, jokes, interrupts itself and flies off in tangents, but it still manages to put across a serious point. One might say that the novel's inherent ambiguity allows Woolf, as she later notes in “A Sketch of the Past” (1939–40), “to slip in things that would be inaudible if one marched straight up and spoke out loud”.
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Citation: Blyth, Ian. "Orlando: A Biography". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 20 September 2002 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=2988, accessed 21 November 2024.]
