A novel that is as witty and playful as it is probing and profound, Virginia Woolf's Orlando is the fantastic story of a person who lives through five centuries, first as a man and then as a woman. The novel opens with Orlando living as a young man in Elizabethan England. A favorite of the queen, Orlando is given a vast estate by the aging monarch and instructed to never to grow old. He doesn't, and Woolf's novel follows him through the centuries, across the globe, through all sorts of love affairs and intrigues, and through his transformation into a woman.
The novel has been famously described by Nigel Nicolson as "the longest and most charming love letter in literature"-and for good reason. Orlando is dedicated to Victoria Sackville-West, who also provided the inspiration for Woolf's androgynous protagonist. Sackville-West was a novelist and poet, and some of her works were published by Virginia and Leonard Woolf's Hogarth Press. Woolf met her in 1923, and the two had a passionate relationship that lasted for almost two decades. Although Sackville-West's affairs were public and quite scandalous, she was also very much a genteel British aristocrat. For her part, Woolf admired Sackville-West's androgyny, a quality which she famously praises in her work A Room of One's Own.
Unique and fantastical, Orlando is Woolf's most light-hearted work, and it is stylistically perhaps her most straightforward. Eschewing stream-of-consciousness and other more experimental narrative techniques that are found in her To the Lighthouse and Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf often uses a largely unadorned style and a third-person narrator, often to effectively parody the male-dominated writing of the nineteenth century.
Orlando was published in 1928 during one of most daring and impressive periods of achievement and development in English literary history. Indeed, not since the heyday of English Romanticism in the early nineteenth century, have so many enduring and groundbreaking masterworks been produced. Orlando was published two years after Woolf's masterpiece, To the Lighthouse, and six years after that annus mirabilis, 1922, which saw the publication of both Eliot's The Waste Land and Joyce's Ulysses. Forster's A Passage to India (1924), Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury (1929) and Woolf's own Mrs. Dalloway (1925) are just a few of the remarkable works of a period which also found artists such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and Wallace Stevens in the United States and D.H. Lawrence and W.B. Yeats in Great Britain working at the height of their powers.
He -- for there could be no doubt of his sex, though the
fashion of the time did something to disguise it -- was in the act of
slicing at the head of a Moor which swung from the rafters. It was the
colour of an old football, and more or less the shape of one, save for
the sunken cheeks and a strand or two of coarse, dry hair, like the hair
on a cocoanut. Orlando's father, or perhaps his grandfather, had struck
it from the shoulders of a vast Pagan who had started up under the moon
in the barbarian fields of Africa; and now it swung, gently,
perpetually, in the breeze which never ceased blowing through the attic
rooms of the gigantic house of the lord who had slain him.
Orlando's fathers had ridden in fields of asphodel, and stony fields,
and fields watered by strange rivers, and they had struck many heads of
many colours off many shoulders, and brought them back to hang from the
rafters. So too would Orlando, he vowed. But since he was sixteen only,
and too young to ride with them in Africa or France, he would steal away
from his mother and the peacocks in the garden and go to his attic room
and there lunge and plunge and slice the air with his blade. Sometimes
he cut the cord so that the skull bumped on the floor and he had to
string it up again, fastening it with some chivalry almost out of reach
so that his enemy grinned at him through shrunk, black lips
triumphantly. The skull swung to and fro, for the house, at the top of
which he lived, was so vast that there seemed trapped in it the wind
itself, blowing this way, blowing that way, winter or summer. The green
arras with the hunters on it moved perpetually. His fathers had been
noble since they had been at all. They came out of the northern mists
wearing coronets on their heads. Were not the bars of darkness in the
room, and the yellow pools which chequered the floor, made by the sun
falling through the stained glass of a vast coat of arms in the window?
Orlando stood now in the midst of the yellow body of an heraldic
leopard. When he put his hand on the window-sill to push the window
open, it was instantly coloured red, blue, and yellow like a butterfly's
wing. Thus, those who like symbols, and have a turn for the deciphering
of them, might observe that though the shapely legs, the handsome body,
and the well-set shoulders were all of them decorated with various tints
of heraldic light, Orlando's face, as he threw the window open, was lit
solely by the sun itself. A more candid, sullen face it would be
impossible to find. Happy the mother who bears, happier still the
biographer who records the life of such a one! Never need she vex
herself, nor he invoke the help of novelist or poet. From deed to deed,
from glory to glory, from office to office he must go, his scribe
following after, till they reach what ever seat it may be that is the
height of their desire. Orlando, to look at, was cut out precisely for
some such career. The red of the cheeks was covered with peach down; the
down on the lips was only a little thicker than the down on the cheeks.
The lips themselves were short and slightly drawn back over teeth of an
exquisite and almond whiteness. Nothing disturbed the arrowy nose in its
short, tense flight; the hair was dark, the ears small, and fitted
closely to the head. But, alas, that these catalogues of youthful beauty
cannot end without mentioning forehead and eyes.
About the Author
One of the most talented and original novelists in English literature, Virginia Woolf was born Virginia Stephen on January 25, 1882 to a prominent English family. Her father was the eminent critic Leslie Stephen, and though Woolf received little in the way of formal education, she read avidly from her father's extensive book collection. Despite the material comforts enjoyed by her family, Woolf's childhood was a traumatic one. She suffered through a period of sexual abuse and endured the early deaths of both her mother and brother. For the rest of her life she would be afflicted by mental illness and periods of extreme depression.
Woolf moved with her sister, the painter Vanessa Bell, to London in 1904 where she met regularly with many of England's finest young artists and intellectuals. "The Bloomsbury Group," as they would come to be known, included Woolf, fellow novelist E.M. Forster, Lytton Strachey, Roger Fry, Benjamin Britten and the economist John Maynard Keynes, among others. This vibrant intellectual community proved important to Woolf's maturation as a thinker and an artist as she embarked upon what would be one of the most remarkable writing careers in English history. It also was important to her personally, as she married fellow Bloomsburian Leonard Woolf in 1912. Virginia Woolf's first novel, The Voyage Out, was published in 1915 to enthusiastic critical reviews. In 1917 she and Leonard founded the Hogarth Press, a house that would publish many striking and original novels including her own later masterpieces. Woolf followed up The Voyage Out with Night and Day (1919) and Jacob's Room (1922). However, it was with the publication of her next few novels, Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), Orlando (1928), and The Waves (1931) that Woolf established herself as one of the most important and innovative novelists in the English-speaking world. Woolf was strongly influenced by the experimental, groundbreaking work of fellow novelist James Joyce, and both artists pushed the novel in new directions towards a fuller representation of inner experience. Woolf's later works of fiction included The Years (1937) and Between the Acts (1941). Woolf was also a prolific essayist, and during the course of her career she published over 500 essays in various periodicals. Her most well-known work of nonfiction is 1929's A Room of One's Own, which discusses the role of women writers in the history of English letters and has since become a classic of literary criticism and feminist theory. Woolf suffered through bouts of depression throughout her life, including a number of acute breakdowns. Sensing the onset of another breakdown, Woolf drowned herself in 1941.
