SOURCE: The Novels of Virginia Woolf Holmes and Meier Publishers, 1977, 237 p.

[In the following excerpt, Lee discusses Woolf's use of the life and writings of Vita Sackville-West as inspiration for Orlando.]

Orlando has a different quality from all Virginia Woolf's other novels, though it is interestingly comparable to many of them, particularly to Jacob's Room and Between the Acts. The difference in quality is suggested by its subtitle, 'A Biography': it is an attempt to represent the character of a real person. Though To the Lighthouse was also, in a sense, biographical, it was not written for the characters who are evoked in the novel. Orlando, by contrast, is a personal offering, dedicated to Vita Sackville-West in a spirit of love and fascination and also of irony.

In writing the book, Nigel Nicolson suggests [in his Portrait of a Marriage], 'Virginia had provided Vita with a unique consolation for having been born a girl.' Orlando is meant to console Vita not only for her sex, but also for her loss of Knole, the ancestral home of the Sackvilles, which came about because she was a woman and could not inherit. Vita had passionate and bitter feelings of possession and loss for Knole, which one can see expressed in her novels The Heir (1922) and The Edwardians (1930) and in her letters to [her husband, Harold Nicolson]: 'Oh God, I do wish that Knole hadn't got such a hold on my heart! If only I had been Dada's son, instead of his daughter!' In The Heir (subtitled 'A Love Story') a quiet little man from Wolverhampton suddenly finds himself in possession of a Kentish Elizabethan manor house. The story describes his increasingly possessive love for the place, which is heavily mortgaged and has to be auctioned. The hero, Chase, finds the thought of losing the house more and more unbearable, for 'The house was the soul; did contain and guard the soul as in a casket… the soul of England.' At the sale he finds himself 'fighting to shield from rape the thing he loved' and buys it back in a defiant gesture 'to cast off the slavery of the Wolverhamptons of this world.' The language of the story is equally emotional throughout, and accurately reflects Vita's passion for family property, and her idea of herself as part of the tradition she inherits:

If could take my England, and could wring
One living moment from her simple year,
One moment only, whether of place or time,
… Then should my voice find echo in English ear;
Then might I say, 'That which I love, I am.'
[The Land]

'I loved it,' she says of Knole in Knole and the Sackvilles, 'and took it for granted that Knole loved me.' The phrase is suggestive of the aristocratic pride which united a distaste for the Wolverhamptons of this world with a strong local feeling for family, house and land. In The Edwardians, published two years after Orlando, Vita recreates her childhood at Knole ('Chevron'). Chevron's beauty dominates the book, and the thought of its becoming national property (as Knole did in 1941) is anathema to the hero. But in The Edwardians the way of life made necessary by the place is treated with some reservations. The hero's sister is a socialist and 'regards our love for Chevron as a weakness.' Chevron's way of life is threatened, and the book is tinged with Vita's wistful acceptance of that fact—a quality similar to the tender nostalgia at the end of Orlando. As in Orlando, too, genders overlap. The brother and sister of The Edwardians are called Sebastian and Viola, and both are in love with the same character. It is interesting that Vita, by this reference to Shakespeare's sexually ambiguous twins, should have followed the consolation for the loss of Knole provided by Orlando. There, Knole is Orlando's because she has been a man; in The Edwardians, Chevron is Vita's because she is a man as well as a woman. Vita's masculine sexuality, which she herself fictionalized in the melodramatic and romantic Challenge (written in 1919 but at the time unpublished), is closely related to her feelings about her family home, and this is made apparent both in her own novel about Knole and in Orlando.

Virginia Woolf understood and admired Vita's feelings for her house and her land, and was interested in the link between those feelings and Vita's sexuality, a link which she recognized as being central to Vita's character. By making Orlando's life span over 300 years and include a change of sex she suggests that Vita's personality was formed equally by its androgyny and by its inheritance from the past. The novel's general themes of history and sexual identity are thus at every point directed towards a description of personality. The historical periods that have created the house have also created Orlando. The book necessitates a double reading; its fantasy and pageantry are being used as the material of a love letter which tells the loved one the writer's opinion of her. As the book goes on, it becomes increasingly concerned with what Vita is like. Virginia Woolf feared that the book, which she had 'begun as a joke,' lacked 'unity.' There is some truth in this; the serious concentration on Orlando's personality is at odds with the very materials and techniques used to create it. The idealization of the character (which Quentin Bell remarks on [in his Virginia Woolf: A Biography]; criticizing it for its nearness to 'the glamorous creations of the novelette') gives an oddly romantic air to a book which partly sets out to be an instrument of ridicule and satire.

For the subtitle is also a joke. The personal emphasis of Orlando is couched in parodic terms; the study of Vita's character is presented through the medium of a literary jeu d'esprit. The game takes various forms. Overall, the techniques of the historical biographer are being ridiculed, very much as in Jacob's Room. What is life? the narrator asks, giving throughout the implied answer that life is not what the biographers make of it, 'since a biography is considered complete if it merely accounts for six or seven selves, whereas a person may well have as many thousand.' The serious experiment in Jacob's Room of 'following hints' in order to get at the truth of life and character is refashioned here into a less arduous and more entertaining shape. Many of the techniques are the same. The biographer is as much in evidence, hanging 'like the hawk moth' 'at the mouth of the cavern of mystery,' periodically standing back to generalize or comment about life and art, speaking to the reader more often and more directly than Orlando does. In Jacob's Room, however, the difficulty of discovering Jacob produced a sense of sadness, anticipating his death. Orlando provides a comic version of the same difficulty. The ironic disparity between the jaunty, factual attempt at biography and the shifting, ambiguous quality of life is parodic rather than elegiac.

The elusiveness of the principal character is not the central theme. Orlando is far closer to us than Jacob; her thoughts frequently overlap with the biographer's. They voice, indistinguishably, questions asked by women and by writers: 'Which is the greater ecstasy? The man's or the woman's?'; 'What then, was Life?'; 'What has praise and fame to do with poetry?' Unlike Jacob, Orlando is a self-conscious participant in the biographer's quest for personality, and at times speaks for her:

'Hair, pastry, tobacco—of what odds and ends are we compounded,' she said (thinking of Queen Mary's prayer book). 'What a phantasmagoria the mind is and meeting-place of dissemblables!'

The biographer is wily. The quaintness of Orlando's vocabulary and the humorous conclusion to her meditation ('she threw her cheroot out of the window and went to bed') prevent us from taking too seriously a platitude with which the biographer is very much in agreement. The light tone avoids solemnity and at the same time allows for flexibility; at any moment we may find that it is the biographer rather than Orlando who is speculating:

Had Orlando, worn out by the extremity of his suffering, died for a week, and then come to life again? And if so, of what nature is death and of what nature life? Having waited well over half an hour for an answer to these questions, and none coming, let us get on with the story.

Here the character of a pompous biographer is being assumed in order for it to be mocked. This satire on traditional biography (which owes a debt to Lytton Strachey's work in the same field) is carried out in various ways, all aimed at showing up the dichotomy between factual biography and true life. The predicament of the biographer whose subject does nothing but write (and whose reader may consequently ask for his money back) is wittily described; the absurdities of 'Acknowledgements' and 'Indexes' are mocked; and the solemn use of historical records is made fun of: 'We have done our best to piece out a meagre summary from the charred fragments that remain; but often it has been necessary to speculate, to surmise, and even to use the imagination.' Orlando's career at this point is given to us through the diary of 'John Fenner Brigge, an English naval officer' and 'Miss Penelope Hartopp, daughter of the General of that name.' Though the pastiche on 'source material' is meant to amuse, it also arises naturally from Virginia Woolf's tendency to create scenes and characters through different observers; Penelope Hartopp's account of events is reminiscent of Ellie Henderson's view of Clarissa's party. In all the literary jokes made in Orlando there is a similar sense of Virginia Woolf's pleasure and natural inclination. Brief satires on legal parlance, ridiculous accounts and examples of Victorian literature, pastiches of Sir Thomas Browne or Jane Austen, sidelong digs at D. H. Lawrence and his gamekeeper or at Hemingway and his monosyllables, burst out energetically from within the general parodic vein. Virginia Woolf does not pursue the parodic line which Joyce takes in 'The Oxen of the Sun' section of Ulysses, where the development of the foetus is imaged in a gargantuan parody of the major styles of English literature from Anglo Saxon to the future time. But there is in Orlando a more moderate form of the same idea. Each historical period, which in itself illustrates or sets off a part of Orlando's character, is invoked by literary or artistic allusions which may (as in the references to Sir Thomas Browne) move towards actual stylistic parody. Usually, however, the allusions suggest rather than imitate the tone of the period.

A major element in the book's humour is the satire directed against Vita herself, and Vita's work. Clearly, we are allowed to view with irony the inconsistency in Orlando which allows him to be 'unaccountably ashamed of the number of his servants and of the splendour of his table' when he is with Nick Greene, and to describe 'with some pride' when she is with Rustum the gipsy 'the house where she was born, how it had 365 bedrooms and had been in the possession of her family for four or five hundred years.' This fond satire on Vita's personal characteristics incorporates a literary debunking of Knole and the Sackvilles, which Vita published in 1922. 'I am reading Knole, 'Virginia Woolf writes to Vita'… you have a rich dusty attic of a mind.' The use she makes of Vita's book on Knole is well suggested by the illustrations which she chose, in consultation with Vita, for the first edition of Orlando. Three of these are photographs of Vita, posed and dressed to suggest Orlando in the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries. One is a photograph of Angelica Bell in outlandish costume, representing Sasha; and three are historical portraits of 'the Archduchess Harriet,' of 'Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine' and of 'Orlando as a boy,' which is the portrait of the young Edward Sackville, son of the fourth Earl of Dorset, one of the illustrations to Knole and the Sackvilles. The combination of photographs of Vita and historical portraits reflects Virginia Woolf's treatment of her subject. In part Orlando really is the history of the Sackvilles at Knole. Many of the details that Vita records are used in Orlando. These may be small matters like the names of the servants, the descriptions of the bowls of potpourri, the mention of King James's silver brushes or of the gallery 'whose floor was laid with whole oak trees sawn across.' But more important themes are also incorporated. Orlando's early tragedies call to mind not only Vita's juvenile historical novels and plays but also Charles Sackville's Gorboduc; Orlando's relationship with Nick Greene refers to the Sackvilles' patronage of the arts; the allusions to Shakespeare echo Vita's attempts to forge some connection between Shakespeare and Knole; Vita herself speaks in Knole of 'the disadvantage of fine birth to a poet.' Vita's desire to 'resurrect the Sackvilles' in her guidebook, to destroy the concept of the house as a historic monument to the dead, is close in spirit to Orlando's wistful sympathy for the house at the end of the book:

The house, with its exits and entrances, its properties of furniture and necessities … the house demands its population. Whose were the hands that have, by the constant light running of their fingers, polished the paint from the banisters? … Who were the men and women that, after a day's riding or stitching, lay awake in the deep beds, idly watching between the curtains the play of the firelight, and the little round yellow discs cast upon walls and ceiling through the perforations of the tin canisters standing on the floor, containing the rush lights?

Thus the house wakes into a whispering life, and we resurrect the Sackvilles. [Knole and the Sackvilles]

Rows of chairs with all their velvets faded stood ranged against the wall holding their arms out for Elizabeth, for James, for Shakespeare it might be, for Cecil, who never came. The sight made her gloomy … Chairs and beds were empty; tankards of silver and gold were locked in glass cases. The great wings of silence beat up and down the empty house.… The gallery stretched far away to a point where the light almost failed. It was as a tunnel bored deep into the past. As her eyes peered down it, she could see people laughing and talking.… [Orlando]

Orlando is an attempt to resurrect the Sackvilles. But it does not treat Vita's literary monument to them as sacrosanct. The game Virginia Woolf plays with Knole is that of exaggerating all its details, taking her cue from Vita's descriptions of the house as having the look of 'a medieval village,' of containing within its 'four acres of building' seven courts, corresponding 'to the days of the week; and in pursuance of this conceit… fifty-two staircases, corresponding to the weeks in the year, and three hundred and sixty-five rooms, corresponding to the days.' Vita admits that she has not verified this count, but the elaborate grandeur of the claim (particularly because of the sense it gives of Knole as a House of Time) attracts Virginia Woolf's attention, and sets the tone for the passage in which she describes Orlando's refurnishing of Knole. Every item in the list of Orlando's expenses is taken from the inventories and lists of 'household stuff' given in the chapter 'Knole in the reign of Charles I'; but the numbers of Spanish blankets, walnut-tree tables, cushions of crimson damask, are wildy exaggerated. Vita's apology for her lists ('I fear lest the detailing of these old papers should grow wearisome') is taken up: 'Already—it is an effect lists have upon us—we are beginning to yawn.'

But though the effect is satirical, it is also creative of atmosphere. Knole is vividly, marvellously realized, partly through the parodic treatment of Vita's book, partly through more lyrical descriptive passages. Such changes of approach are characteristic of Orlando; its interest, and also its weaknesses, arise from the attempt to use several styles and several approaches interchangeably. Her diary notes on the writing of Orlando lay stress on this attempt. It is to be written, she says, in 'a mock style very clear and plain'; but then again 'it has to be half laughing, half serious; with great splashes of exaggeration.' In the end she decides that Orlando is not a complete success: it is 'too freakish and unequal, very brilliant now and then.' Presumably she would, in Orlando, feel open to the charge she herself levels against the purple patch—'not that it is purple but that it is a patch.'

The diary entries point to two of the stylistic variations in Orlando, that between satire and lyricism, and that between the early fantasy and later seriousness of the book. But there are further refinements. Each historical period is evoked in a fluent essayist's style, distinct from the satiric tone used for the pedantic biographer, or from the impressionistic, lyrical style which attempts to reach the heart of Orlando's personality and the nature of life. Even within the 'clear and plain' historical style there are variations. The spirit of each age requires a different literary treatment. Rich, clear, sharp, energetic details evoke the Elizabethan period like a Breughel painting; the vitality, passion and pageantry of the age are encapsulated in the personality of Queen Elizabeth, and in Orlando's affair with Sasha. The literary climate is suggested by a generalized paraphrase of all Elizabethan poetry: 'The moment is brief they sang; the moment is over; one long night is then to be slept by all.' If one turns from this first chapter to the description of the eighteenth century in Chapter Four, one finds different techniques at work. The spirit of the age is preserved in the minds of its major literary figures; as a result the chapter consists largely of anecdotes and quotations, and is summed up by a silhouette portrait of Johnson, Boswell and Mrs Thrale. The nineteenth century, by contrast, is expansively caricatured; the emphasis is on grotesque parody, whether in the generalized account of the country's rising damp or its three-volume novels, or in the exchange about wedding rings between Orlando and Mrs Bartholemew ('The muffins is keepin' 'ot,' said Mrs Bartholemew mopping up her tears, 'in the liberry'). The pictorial images for the age are a Turner cloudscape and an object which suggests a mixture of the Albert Memorial and Crystal Palace:

Draped about a vast cross of fretted and floriated gold were window's weeds and bridal veils; hooked on to other excrescences were crystal palaces, bassinettes, military helmets, memorial wreaths, whiskers, wedding cakes, cannon, Christmas trees, telescopes, extinct monsters, globes, maps, elephants, and mathematical instruments—the whole supported like a gigantic coat of arms on the right side by a female figure clothed in flowing white; on the left, by a portly gentleman wearing a frock-coat and sponge-bag trousers.

The list is impressionistic and elephantine, and far removed in tone from the bizarre precision and archaic tone of the list that describes, as the climax to a series of brilliant descriptive passages, the breaking of the Great Frost:

Many perished clasping some silver pot or other treasure to their breast; and at least a score of poor wretches were drowned by their own cupidity … furniture, valuables, possessions of all sorts were carried away on the icebergs. Among other strange sights was to be seen a cat suckling its young; a table laid sumptuously for a supper of twenty; a couple in bed; together with an extraordinary number of cooking utensils.

Cutting transversely across these linear, historical changes in style is the fluctuation between wit and lyricism in the treatment of Orlando. Where Virginia Woolf is concentrating on the absurdities of the biographer who attempts to create Orlando, or on the relation between Orlando and the spirit of the age, or on Orlando's moments of action, the style is witty, 'clear and plain.' Where she is concentrating, as she does increasingly, on the true, inward nature of personality, the style is lyrical and impressionistic. But a serious tone is never allowed to dominate; the light-fantastic is compulsively reintroduced. This is necessary if Virginia Woolf is to sustain all the levels of the book at once, but it is often rather irritating. It seems at times as though, in making Orlando at once a creature of fantasy who lives for centuries and changes her sex, and at the same time a complex person to be used as the spokesman (like Mary Seton in A Room of One's Own) for women and for women writers, Virginia Woolf has set herself an almost impossible task.

When the sailors began chanting, 'So good-bye and adieu to you, Ladies of Spain,' the words echoed in Orlando's sad heart, and she felt that however much landing there meant comfort, meant opulence, meant consequence and state (for she would doubtless pick up some noble Prince and reign, his consort, over half Yorkshire), still, if it meant conventionality, meant slavery, meant deceit, meant denying her love, fettering her limbs, pursing her lips, and restraining her tongue, then she would turn about with the ship and set sail once more for the gipsies.

Among the hurry of these thoughts, however, there now rose, like a dome of smooth, white marble, something which, whether fact or fancy, was so impressive to her fevered imagination that she settled upon it as one has seen a swarm of vibrant dragon-flies alight, with apparent satisfaction, upon the glass bell which shelters some tender vegetable.

The dome shape is a recurring image of comfort and fulfilment in Virginia Woolf, used here to express the contrast between Orlando's new feelings of restriction at being a woman and the consolation of writing. The process of thought is an extremely serious one—indeed it contains the argument of A Room of One's Own. But seriousness is kept within the realm of fantasy by the artificial rhythms and repetitions of the first paragraph and the elaborate image of the second part. The writer chooses to be winsome and entertaining rather than solemn or didactic; and thereby succeeds only in sounding whimsical and affected.

Though the book's carefully preserved lightness of tone may not always be interesting or persuasive, its serious, innermost intention—the analysis of Orlando's character—is convincingly achieved. Orlando, who is both man and woman, also stands in a dual relation to time. We partly feel that, although Orlando takes over 300 years to reach the age of thirty-six, she does not change. Her essential qualities are already formed when she is an Elizabethan boy of sixteen and continue, over the centuries, to express themselves in her poem, 'The Oak Tree':

How very little she had changed all these years. She had been a gloomy boy, in love with death, as boys are; and then she had been amorous and florid; and then she had been sprightly and satirical; and sometimes she had tried prose and sometimes she had tried drama. Yet through all these changes she had remained, she reflected, fundamentally the same. She had the same brooding meditative temper, the same love of animals and nature, the same passion for the country and the seasons.

It is important that there should be a 'sameness' about Orlando. Although the character becomes more self-possessed and aware as a mature woman than as a young man, he/she is always sulky, beautiful, clumsy, impetuous, devoted to nature and solitude and 'afflicted with a love of literature.' It is by this means that Virginia Woolf emphasizes Orlando's natural androgyny: she is the same character whether she is a man or a woman, and it is evident from the first line of the book that Orlando's man/womanly characteristics overlap. Orlando's 'sameness' enables Virginia Woolf eventually to attack the nineteenth century, the only age to which Orlando cannot adapt her bisexual personality, since it forces men and women into unnaturally rigid marital roles. Ironically, then, the major change in Orlando's life comes not when she turns from man into woman, but when she has to adapt herself to the Victorian age:

Orlando had inclined herself naturally to the Elizabethan spirit, to the Restoration spirit, to the spirit of the eighteenth century, and had in consequence scarcely been aware of the change from one age to the other. But the spirit of the nineteenth century was antipathetic to her in the extreme, and thus it took her and broke her, and she was aware of her defeat at its hands as she had never been before. For it is probable that the human spirit has its place in time assigned to it; some are born of this age, some of that; and now that Orlando was grown a woman, a year or two past thirty indeed, the lines of her character were fixed, and to bend them the wrong way was intolerable.

That Orlando should have permanent qualities, 'fixed lines,' rather than a changing, developing character, is necessary too if we are to bear in mind that the fantasy of Orlando's moving through time is a lighthearted metaphor for her historical consciousness. By the end of the book we think of Orlando as an achieved and real personality, dominated by her powerful feelings of the past history of her house and family. We concentrate, finally, on her consistency, not on the changes she has 'lived' through. This is emphasized in the remarkable passage about the true self and the Captain self which draws to a conclusion our consideration of Orlando/Vita.

She was … changing her selves as quickly as she drove … as happens when … the conscious self, which is the uppermost and has the power to desire, wishes to be nothing but one self. This is what some people call the true self, and it is, they say, compact of all the selves we have it in us to be; commanded and locked up by the Captain self, the Key self, which amalgamates and controls them all.

At a cursory reading the passage suggests that the conscious or true self is the same as the Captain self. But the Captain self is rather the guardian of the true self, standing in the same relationship to it as does the biographer to his subject. Virginia Woolf is the Captain self of the novel who 'amalgamates and controls' all the selves of Orlando. But Orlando too has a Captain self which searches for her true self, the combination of all her identities, with such questions as these:

'What, then? Who, then?' she said. Thirty-six; in a motor-car; a woman. Yes, but a million other things as well. A snob, am I? The garter in the hall? The leopards? My ancestors? Proud of them? Yes! Greedy, luxurious, vicious? Am I? (here a new self came in). Don't care a damn if I am. Truthful? I think so. Generous? Oh, but that don't count (here a new self came in).

The passage continues to delineate all her qualities, though the Captain self does not succeed in finding the true Orlando until she passes through the lodge gates to her house. The questionings suggest Orlando's infinite variety, but they also confirm the reader's sense that Orlando has a recognizable, consistent personality. Because Virginia Woolf wanted to write a lighthearted, not a serious biography, she chose to build Orlando's 'true self' out of a fantastic time sequence rather than out of a day-in-the-life, as with Mrs Dalloway, or out of a sequence from childhood to old age, as with Bernard, who, at the end of The Waves, is a Captain self calling for his true self in manner very similar to Orlando's.

The historical organization of Orlando is, then, a means of showing how Orlando stays the same, not how she changes. Similarly, the sex change does not alter Orlando's character, but her perceptions and her social behaviour. Her perceptions are enriched by it—'She was man; she was woman; she knew the secrets, shared the weaknesses of each'—but her social behaviour is restricted. Because she understands both sides, but has to behave as a woman, she is both enlightened and frustrated. She thus becomes the ideal spokesman for the androgynous argument also being evolved at this time in A Room of One's Own, which, though a more public and straightforward statement than Orlando, uses some of the same techniques, such as the mingling of a chronological account of women through the centuries with the fantasy of Shakespeare's sister. In A Room of One's Own, as in Orlando (and as in the later and less engaging Three Guineas) women are encouraged to cherish and make use of their special qualities, which arise from centuries of oppression:

'Better it is,' she thought, 'to be clothed with poverty and ignorance, which are the dark garments of the female sex; better to leave the rule and discipline of the world to others; better be quit of martial ambition, the love of power, and all the other manly desires if so one can more fully enjoy the most exalted raptures known to the human spirit, which are,' she said aloud, as her habit was when deeply moved, 'contemplation, solitude, love.'

Virginia Woolf says that this train of thought leads Orlando into 'the extreme folly … of being proud of her sex,' but the comment is perhaps not quite true to the tone of the passage from which it arises. A comparison with A Room of One's Own is invited. Here she states that 'it is fatal for anyone who writes to think of their sex. It is fatal to be a man or a woman pure and simple; one must be woman-manly or man-womanly.' Though the need for such impartiality is applied equally to both sexes, there is in her account of the two imaginary writers, Mary Carmichael and Mr A, a definite preference for the woman, insufficiently androgynous though she may be. Orlando is supposed to balance equally the qualities of both sexes, as is shown in this charming analysis of Vita which expresses very clearly Virginia Woolf's feelings about her:

For it was this mixture in her of man and woman, one being uppermost and then the other, that often gave her conduct an unexpected turn. The curious of her own sex would argue, for example, if Orlando was a woman, how did she never take more than ten minutes to dress? And were not her clothes chosen at random, and sometimes worn rather shabby? And then they would say, still, she has none of the formality of a man, or a man's love of power. She is excessively tender-hearted. She could not endure to see a donkey beaten or a kitten drowned. Yet again, they noted, she detested household matters, was up at dawn and out among the fields in summer before the sun had risen.

But Orlando is more a critic of men than of women, and she does in fact become more womanly—'a certain change was visible in Orlando' deeper than the change of clothes. Though she is described as an androgynous personality, her female characteristics seem to dominate. It would be hard to imagine an Orlando in which the sex change was the other way round. Only if Orlando had ended up as a man would the enthusiasm for the hermaphrodite mind be absolutely unbiased. Not until The Waves does the androgynous spokesman become a man. In Orlando the emphasis is feminist; Orlando really does fall into the folly of 'being proud of her sex.'

She is hauled back from such folly, however, by a consideration of the word 'love.' The satisfaction Orlando finds in her relationship with Shelmerdine (far greater than any she enjoyed in her egotistical masculine affairs) is reminiscent of Katharine and Ralph's achievement in Night and Day (and suggestive of Vita's adaptable modus vivendi with Harold Nicolson). Orlando's sense of freedom and excitement in the relationship provides her with those moments of ecstasy which result, here and elsewhere in Virginia Woolf's work, from the personality's being transcended:

It is not articles by Nick Greene or John Donne nor eight-hour bills nor covenant nor factory acts that matter; it's something useless, sudden, violent; something that costs a life; red, purple, blue; a spurt; a splash; like those hyacinths (she was passing a fine bed of them); free from taint, dependence, soilure of humanity or care for one's kind; something rash, ridiculous, like my hyacinth, husband I mean, Bonthrop; that's what it is—a toy boat on the Serpentine, ecstasy—it's ecstasy that matters.

Colours, movements and natural objects are preferred to the masculine world of administration, articulacy and philanthropy. Orlando thrives on an incoherent plane (described in the terms of an abstract painting) where her love for one person is a mixed part of her intense susceptibility to immediate experience. Such ecstasy can only result from an emancipating relationship in which sexual characteristics are blended. The tone and structure of Orlando do not, however, lend themselves to a study of relationships. Shelmerdine is a flimsy and fantastic creature, only serviceable as an agent for the moments of ecstasy, or as an instrument of satire on the nineteenth-century matrimonial instinct, to which Orlando falls an unwilling victim. His return in an aeroplane at the end indiscreetly forces a renewal of the book's fantasy level, which, since the striking of the present time, has been abandoned in favour of a conclusive search for Orlando's 'true self.'

This self lies not in her relationships with other people, but in her relationship with her house and with her writing. The closest analogy between Orlando and her biographer is that both are struggling to find a way of expressing life (or truth, or reality: the terms are frequently interchangeable) in art. Orlando's attempts to write are, like her character, partly evolved from and partly at odds with the historical periods through which she lives. When an Elizabethan, she writes tragedies like Gorboduc; when a seventeenth-century ambassador she reads Sir Thomas Browne and meditates upon tombstones (shrinking from 'the cardinal labour of composition which is excision'); in the eighteenth century she becomes a lover of the picturesque; and in the nineteenth century has to wrestle with the spirit of the age which would have her write 'in the neatest sloping Italian hand … the most insipid verse she had ever read in her life.' In the end Orlando writes Vita's poem The Land—not perhaps a very startling departure from Victorianism, but the result of 'the transaction between a writer and the spirit of the age' which 'is one of infinite delicacy.'

The difficulty of making the transaction when the writer is unsympathetic to his age is only one of the several difficulties which obstruct Orlando in her natural desire to write. Orlando is an aristocrat, by tradition a patron rather than a writer; to become the latter she must 'substitute a phantom' (literature) 'for a reality' (her house and lands). In substituting phantom for reality she is faced with the essential task of every writer (not least of Orlando's biographer, who is much preoccupied with it), that of translating reality into words. 'Life? Literature? One to be made into the other? But how monstrously difficult!'

Like all books about writers, Orlando reflects itself: the book, and the biographer's explanations of her difficulty in writing it, is a mirror, as well as a framework, for Orlando's poem, and her difficulty in writing it. Throughout, the biographer and Orlando both have to tackle again and yet again what it means to have to write; to have, for instance, to try to turn 'green' from a thing into an idea:

He was describing, as all young poets are forever describing, nature, and in order to match the shade of green precisely he looked (and here he showed more audacity than most) at the thing itself, which happened to be a laurel bush growing beneath the window. After that, of course, he could write no more. Green in nature is one thing, green in literature another. Nature and letters seem to have a natural antipathy; bring them together and they tear each other to pieces. The shade of green Orlando now saw spoilt his rhyme and split his metre.

At this early stage in Orlando's literary career he abandons the problem precipitately, and the biographer has done no more than crudely to impress on us the untransferability of greenness into poetry. In the second assault on the same problem, both Orlando and the biographer are more sophisticated. Orlando is at the stage of rejecting all elaboration, all rhetoric, all figures of speech. Let words be things themselves, not other things. But nature itself, he finds, does not invite such treatment, for all its things can be seen as other things. Looking at nature—even before one has written about it—must mean using metaphor. Again he abandons the problem:

So then he tried saying the grass is green and the sky is blue … Looking up, he saw that, on the contrary, the sky is like the veils which a thousand Madonnas have let fall from their hair; and the grass fleets and darkens like a flight of girls fleeing the embraces of hairy satyrs from enchanted woods. 'Upon my word,' he said … 'I don't see that one's more true than another. Both are utterly false.' And he despaired of being able to solve the problem of what poetry is and what truth is, and fell into a deep dejection.

Always, when Orlando returns to the attempt at representation, she works through images, as does her biographer. As the period changes, so too do the figures of speech. In the eighteenth century, 'green' is more formally decorated: 'She compared the flowers to enamel and the turf to Turkey rugs worn thin. Trees were withered hags, and sheep were grey boulders. Everything, in fact, was something else.' But the problems of mimesis remain unsolved, and cannot be solved, since new ways of making 'green' be literature have endlessly to be struggled for. Lightheartedly, and in miniature, Orlando thus suggests the necessity for Virginia Woolf's own unceasing literary experimentation.

In the struggle, the writer has to establish and sustain integrity. Orlando must learn to ignore the flattery or abuse of such as Nick Greene, and come to the point of saying: 'Bad, good, or indifferent, I'll write, from this day forward, to please myself.' All writers, of course, not only those who are also aristocrats or women, have to struggle for that defiant statement, which arises, or should arise, from the continuous tension between exposure and privacy in the writer's life.

While fame impedes and constricts, obscurity wraps about a man like a mist; obscurity is dark, ample, and free; obscurity lets the mind take its way unimpeded.

It is an obvious enough conflict—A Writer's Diary bears evidence to it on almost every page—but not a simple one. Though the writer's initial, and essential, integrity, can be established by sloughing off external influences, there follows the pull towards the outside world, the desire for fame. Orlando has to reject Nick Greene after their first encounter in order to become her own literary master and judge. But she needs him again in his later incarnation (as a man of letters modelled on Sir Edmund Gosse) so that he can give her manuscript what it needs: 'It wanted to be read. It must be read. It would die in her bosom if it were not read.' Only then, after the intercourse with public life, can the writer, justified, withdraw again into obscurity into the centre of her 'true self,' which, for Orlando, is found in her relationship with her house and land:

What has praise and fame to do with poetry? … Was not writing poetry a secret transaction, a voice answering a voice? So that all this chatter and praise and blame and meeting people who admired one and meeting people who did not admire one was as ill suited as could be to the thing itself—a voice answering a voice. What could have been more secret, she thought, more slow, and like the intercourse of lovers, than the stammering answer she had made all these years to the old crooning song of the woods, and the farms and the brown horses standing at the gate, neck to neck, and the smithy and the kitchen and the fields, so laboriously bearing wheat, turnips, grass, and the garden blowing irises and fritillaries?

So she let her book lie unburied and dishevelled on the ground, and watched the vast view, varied like an ocean floor this evening with the sun lightening it and the shadows darkening it.…

The passage gently humanizes the 'crooning' landscape, and treats Orlando's meditation romantically—with a tender allusion to Vita's poem ('… the springing grass / Was dulled by the hanging cups of fritillaries'). It is a serious and restrained conclusion to a book which has been witty, extravagant, even flashy, in tone and manner. The biographer, at this point in full possession of Orlando's true self, creates a mood of sober sympathy for her heroine, and, giving up tricks and jests, herself discreetly disappears.