Virginia Woolf by Alexandra Harris

Author:Alexandra Harris
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Thames & Hudson, Ltd

Vita Sackville-West posing as ‘Orlando about the year 1840’. ‘Do you exist?’ Woolf wondered in a letter of March 1928; ‘Have I made you up?’ (Vita Sackville West from Orlando, A Biography, by Virginia Woolf, London 1928)

Vanessa Bell’s endpapers for Flush, Woolf’s biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s dog. (Vanessa Bell, endpapers for Flush by Virginia Woolf, London 1933 © Estate of Vanessa Bell, courtesy Henrietta Garnett)

It is a sign of Woolf’s confidence that Orlando not only connects with previous novels but makes a public joke of her famous style. There is, for example, a parody of the ‘Time Passes’ section from To the Lighthouse, and in a way the whole book was a riff on the ‘flight of time’ which her friends had once dared her to write. Woolf was parodying herself in other ways too, caricaturing herself as much as Vita. Orlando is visited by the great poet Nick Greene, who cuts a shabby figure at the dining table, talking about his illnesses, invoking literary glory in a bad French accent, and dismissing all other writers of his generation, who happen to be Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Donne. Woolf (whose spoken French was never a strong point) was thoroughly self-knowing about her dismissal of Joyce. And she knew she had slighted Vita’s poetry: poor Orlando can’t get a word in edgeways about his own writing, but is so unaccountably enchanted that he goes on listening until Greene gets fed up with rural life and goes back to London where he belongs – and where, dipping his pen into the eggcup that serves for an inkpot, he proceeds to write a satire on his ill-used country host.9

Though the book was not the ‘outline of her friends’ that Woolf first conceived (that idea branched off into The Waves), Orlando was shaped by her long friendship with Lytton Strachey. For twenty years they had been showing off, outwitting each other, competing for sexual shock value. A gender-changing fantasy stood a good chance of rivalling Strachey’s famous openness about ‘buggery’; and a 500-year biography might challenge even such a controversial form of life-writing as Strachey had practised in Eminent Victorians, where a telling anecdote or two might replace volumes of pious detail. Strachey thought Woolf had chosen the wrong kind of subject matter in her novels and should try something more like Tristram Shandy, which is exactly what she did in Orlando. She reread Sterne’s comic epic in 1926 and borrowed its penchant for mock prefaces and indexes, tantalizing gaps, double entendres, documents scorched in the middle of the most important sentence. Tristram has difficulty getting born; Orlando shows no prospect of dying.

So Orlando was an answer to Lytton. But it was first and foremost an extended letter to Vita, designed for the world to read. Woolf began it just as the closest phase of their affair was coming to an end. Vita, though still devoted, saw that Virginia could give no long-term sexual commitment, and was turning to other women for the stable intimacy she wanted.

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