Orlando
Authors: Virginia Woolf
ORLANDO AS A BOY
PENGUIN BOOKS
Orlando
Virginia Woolf is now recognized as a major twentieth-century author, a great novelist and essayist and a key figure in literary history as a feminist and a modernist Born in 1882, she was the daughter of the editor and critic Leslie Stephen, and suffered a traumatic adolescence after the deaths of her mother, in 1895, and her step-sister Stella, in 1897, leaving her subject to breakdowns for the rest of her life. Her father died in 1904 and two years later her favourite brother Thoby died suddenly of typhoid. With her sister, the painter Vanessa Bell, she was drawn into the company of writers and artists such as Lytton Strachey and Roger Fry, later known as the Bloomsbury Group. Among them she met Leonard Woolf, whom she married in 1912, and together they founded the Hogarth Press in 1917, which was to publish the work of T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster and Katherine Mansfield as well as the earliest translations of Freud. Woolf lived an energetic life among friends and family, reviewing and writing, and dividing her time between London and the Sussex Downs. In 1941, fearing another attack of mental illness, she drowned herself.
Her first novel,
The Voyage Out,
appeared in 1915, and she then worked through the transitional
Night and Day
(1919) to the highly experimental and impressionistic
Jacob’s Room
(1922). From then on her fiction became a series of brilliant and extraordinarily varied experiments, each one searching for a fresh way of presenting the relationship between individual lives and the forces of society and history. She was particularly concerned with women’s experience, not only in her novels but also in her essays and her two books of feminist polemic,
A Room of One’s Own
(1929) and
Three Guineas
(1938). Her major novels include
Mrs Dalloway
(1925),
To the Lighthouse
(1927), the historical fantasy
Orlando
(1928), written for Vita Sackville-West, the extraordinarily poetic vision of
The Waves
(1931), the family saga of
The Years
(1937), and
Between the Acts
(1941). All these are published by Penguin, as are her
Diaries,
Volumes I-V, selections from her essays and short stories, and
Flush
(1933), a reconstruction of the life of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s spaniel.
Brenda Lyons is a doctoral candidate at Balliol College, Oxford, where she is writing on ‘Platonic Allusions in Virginia Woolf’s Fiction’. She
holds an MA in English Literature from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and has been an editor, writer and educator since the publication of
Brahmins and Bullyboys. G. Frank Radway’s Boston Album
(co-edited with Stephen Halpert, 1973).
Sandra M Gilbert is Professor of English at the University of California and has published widely, including four volumes of poetry and a book on D. H. Lawrence. With Susan Gubar she has co-authored
The Madwoman in the Attic
and two volumes of
No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century
(Vol. 1:
The War of the Words
and Vol. 2:
Sex Change
) and co-edited
Shakespeare’s Sisters
and the
Norton Anthology of Literature by Women: The Tradition in English.
Julia Briggs is General Editor for the works of Virginia Woolf in Penguin.
A Biography
VIRGINIA WOOLF
EDITED BY BRENDA LYONS WITH
AN INTRODUCTION AND
NOTES BY SANDRA M. GILBERT
PENGUIN BOOKS
facsimile of the dust jacket of the first edition.
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Orlando
first published by The Hogarth Press 1928
This annotated edition published in Penguin Books 1993
Reprinted in Penguin Classics 2000
13
Introduction and notes copyright © Sandra M. Gilbert, 1993
Other editorial matter copyright © Brenda Lyons, 1993
All rights reserved
The moral right of the editors has been asserted
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
ISBN-13: 978-0-141-18427-2
ISBN-10: 0-141-18427-2
Bibliographical Note
The following is a list of abbreviated titles used in this edition.
Diary: The Diary of Virginia Woolf,
5 vols., ed. Anne Olivier Bell (Hogarth Press, 1977; Penguin Books, 1979).
Letters: The Letters of Virginia Woolf
6 vols., ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann (Hogarth Press, 1975–80).
Passionate Apprentice: A. Passionate Apprentice: The Early Journals, 1897
–
1909,
ed. Mitchell A. Leaska (Hogarth Press, 1990).
Essays: The Essays of Virginia Woolf,
6 vols., ed. Andrew McNeillie (Hogarth Press, 1986).
CE: Collected Essays,
4 vols., ed. Leonard Woolf (Chatto & Windus, 1966, 1967).
Moments of Being: Moments of Being: Unpublished Autobiographical Writings of Virginia Woolf,
ed. Jeanne Schulkind (Hogarth Press, 1985).
Knole: Knole and the Sackvilles,
Vita Sackville-West (Heinemann, 1922).
Letters of Vita: The Letters of Vita Sackville-West to Virginia Woolf,
ed. Louise DeSalvo and Mitchell A. Leaska (Hutchinson, 1984).
Orlando:
Virginia Woolf’s
Vita Nuova
In the autumn of 1927, Virginia Woolf was struggling to compose a critical book on ‘Fiction, or some title to that effect’.
To the Lighthouse,
arguably her strongest novel, had been published a few months earlier to considerable acclaim, but she was bored and troubled by the work she was doing now. Suddenly she claimed to have had a surge of inspiration. As she told the story in a letter of 9 October 1927 to the aristocratic novelist-poet Vita Sackville-West, a close friend with whom she was more than half in love at this time:
Yesterday morning I was in despair… I couldn’t screw a word from me; and at last dropped my head in my hands: dipped my pen in the ink, and wrote these words, as if automatically, on a clean sheet: Orlando: A Biography. No sooner had I done this than my body was flooded with rapture and my brain with ideas. I wrote rapidly till 12… But listen; suppose Orlando turns out to be Vita…
1
Thus began
Orlando,
a witty and parodic ‘biography’ that Woolf was later to describe as ‘a writer’s holiday’, even while she conceded the compulsion she had felt to produce the book: ‘How extraordinarily unwilled by me but potent in its own right… Orlando was! as if it had shoved everything aside to come into existence.’
2
In fact, although Woolf declared that she had embarked upon this
jeu d’esprit
in a kind of trance, she had been meditating a project of this sort for quite some time. In March 1927, when
To the Lighthouse
was at press, she commented in her diary that she was considering writing ‘a Defoe narrative for fun’. She had, she noted, ‘conceived a whole fantasy to be called “The Jessamy Brides” ’ about two women, ‘poor, solitary at the top of a house’
from which one could see ‘anything (for this is all fantasy) the Tower Bridge, clouds, aeroplanes’, adding that the work was
to be written… at the top of my speed… Satire is to be the main note – satire & wildness… My own lyric vein is to be satirized. Everything mocked… For the truth is I feel the need of an escapade after these serious poetic experimental books whose form is always so closely considered. I want to kick up my heels & be off.
3
As the months wore on, she had refined and transformed this idea, remarking even before she wrote to Vita that
One of these days… I shall sketch here, like a grand historical picture, the outlines of all my friends… It might be a most amusing book… Vita should be Orlando, a young nobleman… & it should be truthful; but fantastic.
4
A week or two later, she decided that the work would be ‘a biography beginning in the year 1500 & continuing to the present day, called Orlando: Vita; only with a change about from one sex to another.’
5
At this point in her career, Woolf was at the height of her impressive imaginative and intellectual powers. Born in 1882, to Leslie Stephen, an eminent Victorian man of letters, and his beautiful, lively second wife, Julia, she had been raised in, as she put it, ‘a very communicative, literate, letter writing, visiting, articulate, late-nineteenth-century world’.
6
Even before her marriage in 1912 to the socialist intellectual Leonard Woolf, she had begun to move out of that world and into the centre of the radical and rebellious circle of artists and writers that was to become known as the ‘Bloomsbury Group’. Among other activities, she had studied Greek (still at that time an unusual project for a young woman), taught at a working-women’s college in South London, worked for the women’s movement, and begun writing reviews for
The Times Literary Supplement.
