SOURCE: The World without a Self: Virginia Woolf and the Novel, Yale University Press, 1973, 259 p.

[In the following excerpt, Naremore discusses Wool's attempt in Orlando to devise a new type of biography that evokes personality through a combination of fact and fiction.]

In the interval between the demanding tasks of To the Lighthouse and The Waves, Virginia Woolf was occupied with Orlando, a mock biography inspired partly by her romantic friendship with Vita Sackville-West. The emphasis on fantasy allowed free rein to her naturally ornate, erotic style, and provided good material for sketches of vast, generalized landscapes. Perhaps more important, in pretending to write a biography Mrs. Woolf gave her prose some breathing room above the subjective deeps. As usual, she describes her central character in the third person and from an omniscient perspective; but here she chooses to look down through the eyes of a voluble, often unreliable narrator, a "biographer" who indulges in digressions and flights of description like the famous accounts of the Great Frost or the damp cloud descending over Victorian England. The voice of this narrator is highly flexible, capable of adapting with ease to all the inner emotional rhythms of Orlando's life; at times, however, particularly in the first parts of the book, it stands at a marked distance, observing its subject's behavior with wonder, puzzlement, or even blatant incomprehension. Orlando's conversations with herself are reported, but usually as well-ordered, logical meditations. In general, Orlando employs the techniques of conventional omniscient narration, and, on the surface at least, its existence might imply that Mrs. Woolf had temporarily lost interest in the flow of mental life. Even the plot, granting its outrageousness, is more conventionally "novelistic" than Mrs. Woolf's previous work—certainly no one could charge that nothing happens in this book.

Ultimately, however, Orlando is as much about the inner life as any of Virginia Woolf's other novels. The difference is that here she chose to represent a chiefly internal, implicit experience as if it were objective and explicit. Instead of dealing with an inner life which is at least generally bound by an ordinary circumstantial context, she chose to imagine the racial or family memory in a character much like Vita Sackville-West, and then depicted that memory as a sequence of actual events.… [She] was fascinated with the mind's ability to think back to times before it even existed, and travel to places it has never been. Thus when Mrs. Ramsay sinks into a "core of darkness," she feels that she can go anywhere: "Her horizon seemed to her limitless. There were all the places she had not seen; the Indian plains; she felt herself pushing aside the thick leather curtain of a church in Rome." Orlando's experience has precisely this sort of limitless possibility, but it is presented straightforwardly, in a book that purports to be a biography.

This fanciful device, like all of Mrs. Woolf's experiments, represented another attempt to overcome the problem of isolation; it allowed her to suggest that the envelope surrounding individual lives is in some sense permeable, permitting some contact with what lies "outside." Hence we encounter a recognizable stream of consciousness only in the later chapters of Orlando, and find there that Virginia Woolf is no longer satisfied with the ordinary flotsam of the internal monologue—she is approaching those deeper, more communal regions Joyce treats in some parts of Ulysses and in Finnegans Wake:

"Sheets for a double bed," Orlando repeated dreamily, for a double bed with a silver counterpane in a room fitted with taste which she now thought a little vulgar—all in silver; but she had furnished it when she had a passion for that metal. While the man went to get sheets for a double bed, she took out a little looking-glass and a powder puff. Women were not nearly as roundabout in their ways, she thought, powdering herself with the greatest unconcern, as they had been when she herself first turned woman on the deck of the Enamoured Lady. She gave her nose the right tint deliberately. She never touched her cheeks. Honestly, though she was now thirty-six, she scarcely looked a day older. She looked just as pouting, as sulky, as handsome, as rosy (like a million-candled Christmas tree, Sasha had said) as she had done that day on the ice, when the Thames was frozen and they had gone skating—

"The best Irish linen, Ma'am," said the shopman, spreading the sheets on the counter,—and they had met an old woman picking up sticks. Here, as she was fingering the linen abstractedly, one of the swinging doors between the departments opened and let through, perhaps from the fancy-good departments, a whiff of scent, waxen, tinted as if frors pink candles, and the scent curved like a shell round a figure—was it a boy's or was it a girl's?—young, slender, seductive—a girl, by God! furred, pearled, in Russian trousers; but faithless, faithless!

As the story of Orlando's "life" reaches its conclusion, every sensation evokes a web of associations. The effect is extraordinary: the fall of every "atom"—the shopkeeper's talk, the glimpse of a reflection in a hand mirror, the scent drifting in through an open door—activates a "tremour of susceptibility." The previous events of the tale are gathered up in a single moment, and, like Bernard in The Waves, Orlando knows the feeling of time "whizzed back an inch or two on its reel"; also like Bernard, she participates in other selves, even other sexes. In one sense the moment is poignant, because Sasha and youth are gone—yet in another sense it is a joyful and triumphant experience, because all time, all distinctions, all finality seem to have been overcome.

Such passages reveal the basic similarity between Orlando and Mrs. Woolf's other work—again she presents a victory over time and death, again she insists on the unity of experience. In this case, however, she was directly concerned with historical consciousness, and with an attack on the deadening empiricism of most biographical literature. If she felt that the novels of Bennett and Galsworthy had been weighted down by a superficial realism, she found the typical biography, with its slavish attention to facts, even more burdensome. The biographer's work is grounded in a tight little realm of detail and distinction, much like the everyday reality that grows up around characters in The Waves; biography, as it is usually practiced, deals with our "shell," not our soul, with our temporal, not our eternal being. In one sense, then, the historian's facts threaten our survival, so that Mrs. Woolf's playful satire of historicism in Orlando represents a perfectly serious attempt to show us a world which cannot be explained by fact, a world in which the changes wrought by historical process become merely "what you see us by."

All this is not to say that Virginia Woolf was disinterested in conventional historical writings—on the contrary, like everyone else in Bloomsbury, she was fascinated by them. But in Orlando, as in most cases where she deals with historical subject matter, she tries to create an imaginative unity between past and present, and in so doing exposes the relative emptiness of empirical data. Humanity, she seems to say, has always shared a common life; only the external circumstances of time and place make us seem different. She had touched on this theme many times before, especially in her essays. In "The Pastons and Chaucer," for example, she refuses to take the impersonal, scholarly point of view of a writer who is forever removed from medieval England. Instead she shows us how John Paston felt as he sat alone reading:

For sometimes, instead of riding off on his horse to inspect his crops or bargain with his tenants, Sir John would sit, in broad daylight, reading. There, on the hard chair in the comfortless room with the wind lifting the carpet and the smoke stinging his eyes, he would sit reading Chaucer, wasting his time, dreaming—or what strange intoxication was it he drew from books? Life was rough, cheerless, and disappointing. A whole year of days would pass fruitlessly in dreary business, like dashes of rain on the windowpane. There was no reason in it as there had been for his father; no imperative need to establish a family and acquire an important position for children who were not born … But Lydgate's poems or Chaucer's, like a mirror in which figures move brightly, silently, and compactly, showed him the very skies, fields, and people whom he knew, but rounded and complete. Instead of waiting listlessly for news from London or piecing out from his mother's gossip some country tragedy of love and jealousy, here, in a few pages, the whole story was laid before him.

"The Pastons and Chaucer" is no excavation of dead relics from the past. It recreates Paston before our eyes, presenting him as a character like Rachel Vinrace or Mrs. Ramsay, a sensitive person who exchanges rough life for dreamy solitude. Paston is also like the characters in Between the Acts who are troubled by the fragmentary quality of ordinary life; he feels dependent on the piecemeal facts of "news" or "gossip," which have to travel across time and space. But when he retreats from active life and gives himself over to imagination, he can understand "the whole story." Moreover, just as the imagination of Chaucer redeems Paston, so the imagination of Virginia Woolf, who has absorbed both Paston and Chaucer, helps to redeem us. As we sit reading Mrs. Woolf's essay, we half share in Paston's experience. Like him, we overcome boundaries and seem to understand a life "rounded and complete." Without leaving our chairs, we take imaginative possession of an event that occurred hundreds of years before our birth.

This kind of triumph over space and time can be found everywhere in Virginia Woolf's writing, but in essays like "The Pastons and Chaucer," in Orlando, and subsequently in Between the Acts, it becomes more specifically the triumph of imagination over the historical process. Thus the many evident similarities between Orlando and Between the Acts: both deal with the realm of action and affairs and treat that realm with a good deal of comic irony; both use a magnificent country estate as a focal point, and end with night scenes in which a man and a woman move toward each other across a timeless, otherworldly landscape. In both Mrs. Woolf employs bits of parody and doggerel language, and adapts her familiar style to new techniques, with less emphasis on the watery language and single ghostly voice of her previous novels. Finally, both books present history as a kind of pageant, where the costumes change but the actors remain essentially the same.

Between the Acts, however, is occasioned by the events leading up to World War II, so that its darker moments always contain the tension of an impending brute violence. Orlando is in every sense a happier book, chiefly because it was prompted by a love for Vita Sackville-West and by Mrs. Woolf's long-standing interest in biographical literature. Indeed, to appreciate Orlando fully, to understand a few of the motives behind its technical peculiarities, one needs to know something of its background. One should recognize, for example, that it refers back to Leslie Stephen's Dictionary of National Biography, that it is contemporary with Lytton Strachey's anti-Victorian life studies and his quasi-fictional Elizabeth and Essex, and that it looks forward to Virginia Woolf's own attempt at biography in Roger Fry. In addition, there are two less widely-known Bloomsbury biographies which have a more direct bearing on what Mrs. Woolf called her "writer's holiday": Harold Nicolson's Some People, and his wife Vita Sackville-West's Knole and the Sackvilles. To read these books, together with Mrs. Woolf's writings on biography, is to see that Orlando is not just "about" her friends; it is, in part, both a response to their work and a commentary on the relationship between "fact" and imagination.

The only critic who has written at length about the "biographical" subject of Orlando is Leon Edel. In his Alexander Lectures, published as Literary Biography, Professor Edel offers a long digression on what he calls Virginia Woolf's "fable for biographers":

The idea for the work appears to have been given to Virginia Woolf by Lytton Strachey. One day at lunch, he told her … "You should take something wilder and more fantastic, a framework that admits of anything, like Tristram Shandy." This fictional biography thus stems from a preeminent figure in modern biography. The acknowledgement … carries not only Strachey's name, but also that of another biographer, Harold Nicolson … who was to write a little volume on biography published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf at the Hogarth Press. The plot thickens considerably when we note that Sir Harold Nicolson's wife is none other than Vita Sackville-West. And if we remind ourselves that Virginia Woolf's father, Sir Leslie Stephen, was the editor of the Dictionary of National Biography, we have a vision of Orlando in the cradle, grandfathered and uncled by a group of biographers.

Edel might have added that Orlando also has an "aunt," since Vita Sackville-West was herself a talented biographer, and since Knole and the Sackvilles is Virginia Woolf's primary source for historical detail. Moreover, while Lytton Strachey may have planted the seeds that matured into Mrs. Woolf's book, her immediate inspiration was apparently Harold Nicolson's series of character sketches, Some People. The Elizabethan adventures in Orlando and even the use of illustrations in the early Hogarth editions probably owe something to Strachey's Elizabeth and Essex, but it is difficult to say just how much; both books were published in 1928, though Strachey had begun work in 1925, two years before Orlando was conceived. It was in October, 1927, that the specific idea for Orlando came to Mrs. Woolf. On Wednesday, October 5, she wrote in her Diary: "having done my last article for the Tribune … instantly the usual exciting devices enter my mind: a biography beginning in the year 1500 and continuing to the present day, called Orlando: Vita, only with a change about from one sex to another." The "last article" she mentions was an essay-review of Some People, which appeared in the New York Herald Tribune on October 30, under the title "The New Biography." Just as the feminist didactics of Orlando can be connected with A Room of One's Own (1928), so the comic, hyperbolic style and the biographical satire can be demonstrated to follow from what Virginia Woolf had just written about Nicolson. But while the relationship between Orlando and A Room of One's Own has often been noted, the essay on Nicolson and the similar but later discussion of Strachey, entitled "The Art of Biography," need more emphasis.

Virginia Woolf's review of Some People opens with an analogy which would ultimately produce the title Granite and Rainbow for one of her collections of essays: "if we think of truth as something of granite-like solidity and of personality as something of rainbow-like intangibility and reflect that the aim of biography is to weld these two into one seamless whole, we shall admit that the problem is a stiff one and that we need not wonder if biographers have for the most part failed to solve it." In this sentence, Mrs. Woolf outlines the thesis that would preoccupy her in Orlando and in her subsequent essay on Strachey. Indeed, the dichotomy she presents here between biographical truth and human personality, between granite and rainbow, is akin to other antithetical structures at the heart of her writings—surface and depths, masculine and feminine, day and night, fact and imagination—and it cannot be underemphasized. The first term of each pair of contrasts always refers to something solid, distinct, mundane, and perishable; the second points to something disembodied, misty, visionary, and nearly eternal. The one is represented by Mr. Bennett, the other by Mrs. Brown. This kind of opposition is touched upon when Rachel Vinrace contemplates the difference between her inner life and the everyday world where "things went round and round quite satisfactorily to other people," or when the speaker in "The Mark on the Wall" contrasts the sea-green depths of consciousness with the Table of Precedency, or even when Mrs. Ramsay reads poetry while Mr. Ramsay enjoys Walter Scott. In the context of the essay on Harold Nicolson, the familiar antithesis is posed as a problem for biographers: the biographer serves the world of factual truth, but his aim, in the words of Sidney Lee, is the "'transmission of personality.'" Is it ever possible, Mrs. Woolf asks, to bring these conflicting notions together?

Some of her most intimate friends were trying to solve the problem by combining the roles of biographer and creative artist; in her essays on biography she applauded their efforts, even though she obviously did not believe they had succeeded. At least, she wrote, they had improved on the Victorian authors of what she calls the "old" biography. Both her review of Some People and her essay on Lytton Strachey make essentially the same points about the Victorians: nineteenth-century biographers distorted the personalities of their subjects because they were ploddingly factual and "dominated by the idea of goodness." J. A. Froude's biography of Carlyle had helped alter the current fashion for ignoring the subject's sex life and permitting him "only a smooth superficial likeness to the body in the coffin"; and Edmund Gosse had dared to show that even his father had imperfections. But in Mrs. Woolf's eyes the first true revolutionary was Strachey, who was basically irreverent and possessed of "gifts analogous to the poet's," even if he did not have the poet's "inventive power." Nevertheless, Mrs. Woolf argues that Strachey was successful only in Queen Victoria. Eminent Victorians she calls a set of "caricatures," whereas Elizabeth and Essex, one of Strachey's most ambitious works, she thinks went too far in flouting the limitations of biography. Victoria's life had been scrupulously authenticated, but Strachey indulged himself in fictions about Elizabeth, who inhabited a strange and relatively obscure age. Thus, Mrs. Woolf says, Strachey's Elizabeth "moves in an ambiguous world, between fact and fiction, neither embodied nor disembodied." Strachey had not achieved a synthesis of rainbow and granite, had not managed the fruitful exchange between the two worlds that Mrs. Woolf works for everywhere in her writings. In fact, she says, a true dialectic between those worlds is probably impossible. If the biographer "invents facts as an artist invents them—facts that no one else can verify—and tries to combine them with facts of the other sort, they destroy each other."

Harold Nicolson's work revealed the same problems as Strachey's, though in certain ways it evidently struck her as more experimental and intriguing. His Some People is an eccentric but charming hybrid of a book, redolent of a secure English gentility more remote today than the mountains of the moon. It contains a series of character sketches based on Nicolson's experiences in the diplomatic service, and the early editions are prefaced with this brief, Puckish note: "Many of the following sketches are purely imaginary. Such truths as they may contain are only half-truths." Like Orlando, Some People is a playful book, though not outrageously so. If it lacks high seriousness, it does convey some of the pleasures of light, sophisticated literature. Thus we meet such characters as Jeanne de Henant, who is seen quoting Verlaine through the languid plumes of her cigarette smoke; Jeanne's mother, listening to the Alexandrine her daughter has quoted and "scratching the top of her bald brown head with a table fork," mumbles "Tu as des idees saugrenues." Years later, Nicolson was to explain that Jeanne and her mother are "an exact description of a French family in which I lived while preparing my examination for the Diplomatic Service … nothing fictional has been introduced." But the character of Jeanne is really no less vivid than the essentially fictional "Miss Plimsoll," a governess whose nose was "sharp and pointed like that of Voltaire.… When the thermometer fell below 60 it turned scarlet: below 50 it assumed a blue tinge with a little white morbid circle at the end; and at 40 it became sniffly and bore a permanent though precarious drop below its pointed tip."

Virginia Woolf admired Nicolson's book even though she recognized its essential slightness and fragility. Nevertheless, she was troubled by the presence of characters like Miss Plimsoll, whom she suspected were fictional: "Even here," she wrote, "where the imagination is not deeply engaged, when we find people we know to be real, like Lord Oxford or Lady Colefax, mingling with Miss Plimsoll…, whose reality we doubt, the one casts suspicion upon the other. Let it be fact, one feels, or let it be fiction; the imagination will not serve under two masters simultaneously." Thus, although she regarded Nicolson as an important example of the biographer as artist, who had indicated a "possible direction," there remained for Virginia Woolf no author "whose art is subtle and bold enough to present that queer amalgamation of dream and reality, that perpetual marriage of granite and rainbow" which is the essence of a truthful depiction of personality.

As I have said, Mrs. Woolf began Orlando with these issues very much in mind. In a letter to Vita Sackville-West concerning the new book, she remarked, "it sprung upon me how I could revolutionize biography in a night." Of course she did not even write a biography, much less revolutionize the form, and it is difficult to say just how seriously she went about this task. But clearly the ideas she had outlined in her essay on Nicolson are central to Orlando; indeed, even the granite-rainbow metaphor appears in one of the narrator's more significant digressions. Speaking of the difficulty of transmitting Orlando's personality, the biographer-persona comments:

Nature, who has played so many queer tricks upon us, making us so unequally of clay and diamonds, of rainbow and granite, and stuffed them into a case, often of the most incongruous,… nature, who has so much to answer for besides the perhaps unwieldy length of this sentence, has further complicated her task and added to our confusion by providing … a perfect rag-bag of odds and ends within us… [and] has contrived that the whole assortment shall be lightly stitched together by a single thread.

The narrator of Orlando, while trying to do his (or her) duty as a biographer, is much troubled by all the complexities in human personality that we typically find in Mrs. Woolf's novels. In fact, Orlando is largely devoted to conflicts between the biographer and the artist—conflicts from which the artist always emerges victorious.

Even so, the book does have a kind of basis in biographical fact. To see how Mrs. Woolf has adapted her historical sources, one need only read Frank Baldanza's brief but excellent account in "Orlando and the Sackvilles" [PMLA, March 1955]. As Baldanza shows, Virginia Woolf drew heavily on Vita Sackville-West's Knole and the Sackvilles (1922), a biography of the grand country estate which had been in possession of the Sackville family since 1566. The details used to describe Orlando's home, even down to the imagery itself, are mostly taken from Miss Sackville-West's account of Knole, although they have been freely adapted to the services of fiction. The person of Orlando is a composite of the Sackville family, merged at last into the figure of Vita Sackville-West, who, in 1927, won the Hawthornden Prize for her poem "The Land," which is quoted in Orlando and retitled "The Oak Tree." The early Orlando bears a superficial resemblance to Thomas Sackville, poet and author of Gorboduc, who was appointed treasurer to Elizabeth and presented with Knole because, as legend has it, the Queen "wished to have him nearer to her court and councils." Like Charles Sackville, the second Duke of Dorset, Orlando briefly loves a mysterious Russian lady. The gypsy girl he later takes for a wife in Constantinople is based on a real Pepita, a Spanish dancer who was Vita Sackville-West's grandmother and, like Orlando after his sex change, the subject of extensive litigation to determine the true heir of Knole. [The critic adds in a footnote: "The history of Pepita is not found in Knole and the Sackvilles, but in a later book by Vita Sackville-West, Pepita."] Even the household servants at Orlando's estate—Mrs. Grimsditch, Mr. Dupper, Mrs. Stewkly, Nurse Carpenter, and Grace Robinson the blackamoor—can be found in Knole and the Sackvilles: they are listed in a catalog of the household at Knole under Richard Sackville, the seventeenth-century Earl of Dorset.

But Knole and the Sackvilles was more than a sourcebook, and it seems to me that Baldanza's careful research does not indicate its full significance. Vita Sackville-West herself was too modest about the possible influence of her book. In 1955, she wrote that Orlando was inspired by Virginia Woolf's "own strange conception of myself, my family, and Knole … They satisfied her acute sense of the continuity of history." The "strange conception" was indeed Virginia Woolf's own, but it was echoed and doubtless stimulated by what she had read in Knole and the Sackvilles, like this passage about the garden at the estate:

… the garden, save for one small section where the paths curve in meaningless scollops among the rhododendrons, remains today very much as Anne Clifford knew it.… The white rose which was planted under James I's room has climbed until it now reaches beyond his windows on the first floor; the great lime has drooped its branches until they have layered themselves in the ground of their own accord and grown up again with fresh roots into three complete circles all sprung from the parent tree… the magnolia outside the Poet's Parlour has grown nearly to the roof, and bears its mass of flame-shaped blossoms like a giant candelabrum; the beech hedge is twenty feet high; four centuries have winnowed the faultless turf.… The soil is rich and deep and old. The garden has been a garden for four hundred years.

Here was an ultracivilized representation of that nearly timeless but often frightening natural unity Virginia Woolf tried to suggest in all her novels. In Orlando itself there is a whimsical reference to the oak tree which the hero has known since "Somewhere about the year 1588," and which is "still in the prime of life."

Vita Sackville-West's comments on the significance of her family history must also have struck a responsive chord in Mrs. Woolf: "Such interest as the Sackvilles have," she wrote, "lies … in their being so representative. From generation to generation they might stand, fully equipped, as portraits from English history,… let them stand each as the prototype of his age, and at the same time as a link to carry on, not only the tradition but also the heredity of his race, and they immediately acquire a significance, a unity." Such a notion is a step—a large step perhaps, but only a step—from Virginia Woolf's fanciful conception of "portraits from English history" rendered through the life of a single person. Yet Miss Sackville-West continues in this vein, until a kind of sexual transformation seems implicit in what she says about her forebears. Not only were they a family of lovers and would-be poets, but the masculine side of the family had ceased to dominate by the eighteenth century. Looking at the portrait gallery in Knole, she writes:

You have first the grave Elizabethan, with the long, rather melancholy face, emerging from the oval frame above the black clothes and the white wand of office… You come down to his grandson: he is the Cavalier by Vandyck … hand on hip, his flame-coloured doublet slashed across by the blue of the Garter… You have next the florid, magnificent Charles, the fruit of the Restoration, poet, and patron of poets, prodigal, jovial, and licentious … in his Garter robes and his enormous wig, his foot and fine calf well thrust forward… the crony of Rochester and Sedley, the patron and host of Pope and Dryden … you come down to the eighteenth century. You have on Gainsborough's canvas the beautiful, sensitive face of the gay and fickle duke…You have his son, too fair and pretty a boy, the friend of Byron, … the last direct male.

I do not mean to suggest that the sexual theme of Orlando derives wholly or even chiefly from Knole and the Sackvilles; but a passage like this one must have provided food for Mrs. Woolf's imagination. There are no female portraits here, yet when one reads this description, it is as if a slow metamorphosis were overtaking a single representative of the Sackvilles, taking him through the ages and making him gradually more feminine in the progress.

If Knole and the Sackvilles supplied Virginia Woolf with historical detail and perhaps even suggested the themes and plot of Orlando, it also stood as another example of a biography to which she might respond. Like the "new" biography, Knole and the Sackvilles is a very personal book, characterized by what Mrs. Woolf called a "lack of pose, humbug, solemnity." It is far from comic, but it talks fairly openly about the sex life of the Sackvilles, and focuses on domestic events rather than public careers. Miss Sackville-West is clearly more interested in her ancestors' poetry than in their politics, and hence her book is different from Victorian biography, where, as Virginia Woolf wrote, chapter headings such as "life at college, marriage, career" make "arbitrary and artificial distinctions." Like the new biography as Mrs. Woolf later described it, Knole and the Sackvilles is a small volume in which "the author's relation to his subject is different. He is no longer the serious and sympathetic companion, toiling … slavishly in the footsteps of his hero. Whether friend or enemy … he is an equal."

But Vita Sackville-West's personal, sometimes even poetic little book about her family home is filled nearly to the brim with odd facts. One of the fascinations of Knole and the Sackvilles for anyone interested in English history is the large number of minor documents it quotes—letters; amateur poems; diaries; catalogs of members of the household; account-books with expenses dutifully entered in the margins; petitions; menus; inventories; official reports of parliament; receipts; even a sort of dictionary of thieves' slang, dated 1690, which was found scribbled on the back of an official paper. These quaint but often sober details are sometimes cited at great length, and even though Virginia Woolf had written that biographical "fact" gave "rest and refreshment" to the imaginative faculties, at least once in Orlando she clearly makes fun of Vita Sackville-West's charming pedantry. The source of her amusement is the fifth chapter of Knole and the Sackvilles, where, among sundry other documents, we find a list of "household stuff" dated July, 1624, and including "a pair of Spanish blankets, 5 curtains of crimson and white taffeta, the valance to it of white satin embroidered with crimson and white silk," "a yellow satin chair and 3 stools, suitable with their bukram covers," "a said bag, wherein are 9 cups of crimson damask laid with silver parchment lace," "2 brass branches for a dozen lights apiece," "6 pairs of mats to mat chambers with at 30 yards apiece," "2 walnut tree tables," and "a box containing 3 dozen of venice glasses." The list goes on for about two pages, after which Miss Sackville-West apologizes, "I fear lest the detailing of these old papers should grow wearisome." In Orlando this passage is openly mocked; when the hero takes an interest in refurbishing his estate, Mrs. Woolf's biographer-persona attempts to verify the truth of his report by quoting a document:

He now set to work in earnest, as we can prove beyond a doubt if we look at his ledgers. Let us glance at an inventory of what he bought at this time, with the expenses totted up in the margin—but these we omit.

"To fifty pairs of Spanish blankets, ditto curtains of crimson and white taffeta; the valence to them of white satin embroidered with crimson and white silk.…

"To seventy yellow satin chairs and sixty stools suitable with their buckram covers to them all.…

"To sixty seven walnut tree tables.…

"To seventeen dozen boxes containing each dozen five dozen of Venice glasses.…

"To one hundred and two mats, each thirty yards long.…

"To ninety seven cushions of crimson damask laid with silver parchment lace and footstools of cloth of tissue and chairs suitable.…

"To fifty branches for a dozen lights apiece.…"

Already—it is an effect lists have upon us—we are beginning to yawn.

A passage like this one leads quite naturally to the issue of parody in Orlando. Only with respect to this list can Orlando be considered a parody of Knole and the Sackvilles. In fact it is a parody at all only in a very limited sense, the prose style undergoes some changes, but the book has relatively little in common with Joyce's "Oxen of the Sun." At most, one can point to the mock preface and index, which mimic the form of scholarly biography, and a few passages which allude to other writings without really trying to imitate them. Here, for example, is a probable reference to Lady Chatterley's Lover, which was distributed privately in England in 1928:

Surely, since she is a woman, and a beautiful woman, … she will soon give over this pretense of writing and thinking and begin at least to think of a gamekeeper … And then she will write him a little note… and make an assignation for Sunday dusk … all of which is, of course, the very stuff of life and the only possible subject for fiction.… love—as the male novelists define it—and who, after all, speak with greater authority?—has nothing whatever to do with kindness, fidelity, generosity, or poetry. Love is slipping off one's petticoat and—But we all know what love is.

And here Mrs. Woolf makes fun of her own writing in a reference to the novel she had just published:

He saw the beech trees turn golden and the young ferns unfurl; he saw the moon sickle and then circular; he saw—but probably the reader can imagine the passage which should follow and how every tree and plant in the neighborhood is described first green, then golden; how moons rise and suns set; how night succeeds day and day night; how things remain much as they are for two or three hundred years or so, except for a little dust and a few cobwebs which one old woman can sweep up in half an hour; a conclusion which, one cannot help feeling, might have been reached more quickly by the simple statement that "Time passed" (here the exact amount could be indicated in brackets) and nothing whatever happened.

And yet, while mocking references do not make a parody, Orlando did serve to liberate Mrs. Woolf's prose; the author seems conscious throughout of the comic potential in her inherently ornate language. At one extreme, the style has a lively but slightly archaic quality, almost like an imitation of an eighteenth-century comic novel: "many a time did Orlando, pacing the little courtyard, hold his heart at the sound of some nag's steady footfall on the cobbles"; "Seizing the pen with which his little boy was tickling the cat's ears, and dipping it into the egg-cup which served for inkpot, Greene dashed off a very spirited satire there and then". At the other extreme—what might be called the extreme of modernity—are two curious passages in the last chapter, where the narrator drifts into a sort of nonsense-language full of doggerel. It is as if the speaker were out on the edge of a mysterious terrain, talking aloud just to save the book from extinction. The first passage occurs when Orlando sits down to write and the biographer finds that there is nothing to say:

Let us go, then, exploring, this summer morning, when all are adoring the plum blossom and the bee. And humming and hawing, let us ask the starling (who is a more sociable bird than the lark) what he may think on the brink of the dustbin, whence he picks among the sticks combings of scullion's hair. What's life, we ask, leaning on the farmyard gate; Life, Life, Life! cries the bird, as if he had heard.

The second passage precedes the birth of Orlando's child. Here is a portion of it:

Oh yes, it is Kew! Well, Kew will do. So here we are then at Kew, and I will show you to-day (the second of March) under the plum tree, a grape hyacinth, and a crocus, and a bud, too, on the almond tree; so that to walk there is to be thinking of bulbs, hairy and red, thrust into the earth in October, flowering now; and to be dreaming of more than can rightly be said, and to be taking from its case a cigarette or cigar even, and to be flinging a cloak under (as the rhyme requires) an oak, and there to sit, waiting the kingfisher.

Mrs. Woolf seemed fond of this new style. She wrote in her Diary, "I feel more and more sure that I will never write a novel again. Little bits of rhyme come in." And though of course she did continue to write novels, her interest in the strange new manner stayed with her; consider, for example, the oddly trivialized language she used later in Between the Acts. Significantly, the doggerel passages in Orlando occur when the biographer is faced with the problem of describing poetic and sexual creativity. In both cases he makes some attempt to represent mysterious powers which seem beyond his power or will to invoke directly; we have, for example, the bird's cry of "Life," and the highly sexual "bulbs, hairy and red, thrust into the earth." Perhaps in the largest sense, the narrator's babble signifies the inadequacy not only of biography, which cannot explore the most intimate and important parts of the subject's life, but also of language itself. There are suggestions of this idea elsewhere in Mrs. Woolf's fiction, particularly when her characters undergo a "dissolution." In Orlando there are similar moments, when the hero-heroine is described asleep, in a state of sexual rapture, or sunk in intense imaginative concentration. Toward the end of the book, these moments are described in a language that is almost as disembodied as Orlando herself, as if the biographer had come to the end of the tether. At one point Orlando seems to comment on the significance of the phenomenon: "'And if I were dead,' she exclaims upon rising from the poem she has been composing, 'it would be just the same!'"

The typical writer of "old" biography, as described in Mrs. Woolf's essays, might echo Orlando's sentiments, though for different reasons: in his view, so long as the heroine is writing a poem instead of fighting a war or running for office, she might as well be a corpse. But the biographer of Orlando is not typical, though he sometimes claims to be. Even when he sounds most pompous or naive, one cannot be sure that he is unaware of his own ironies. At first he welcomes the opportunity to write about an aristocratic man of action: "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 whatever seat it may be that is the height of their desire." In the next breath, however, the narrator confesses that Orlando is hardly the subject for a pedant's vicarious fantasies; Orlando wants to go to war, but he also has a poetic and feminine side: "Directly we glance at eyes and forehead, we have to admit a thousand disagreeables which it is the aim of every good biographer to ignore." The narrator of Orlando is certainly not a "good" biographer, and by the time we reach the end of the book, he has committed all sorts of heresies against scientific objectivity. Toward the end he remarks, "The true length of a person's life, whatever the Dictionary of National Biography may say, is always a matter of dispute. For it is a difficult business—this time-keeping; nothing more quickly disorders it than contact with any of the arts."

Orlando's biographer is probably best described as a mask, a pose which Mrs. Woolf can assume or drop at will. Thus chapter 2 opens with an ironic apology for the biographer's "difficulty": "Up to this point … documents, both private and historical, have made it possible to fulfill the first duty of a biographer, which is to plod, without looking to right or left, in the indelible footprints of truth … on and on methodically till we fall plump into the grave and write finis on the tombstone above our heads." But the previous chapter has not been concerned with "documents," and the biographer, there as elsewhere, seems more inclined to poetry than to history. For example, when Orlando drops off to sleep in the first chapter, overtaken by one of those hypnotic moods Mrs. Woolf depicts so often, we are told that "his limbs grew heavy on the ground;… by degrees the deer stepped nearer and the rooks wheeled round him and the swallows dipped and circled and the dragon flies shot past, as if all the fertility and amorous activity of a summer's evening were woven web-like about his body." Later in the chapter, the brilliantly hyperbolic description of the Great Frost is supposedly based on the evidence of "historians." But these historians are very different from ours; they tell us that "Birds froze in mid-air and fell like stones to the ground," and that in Norwitch, "a young country woman started to cross the road … and was seen by the onlookers to turn visibly to powder and be blown in a puff of dust over the roofs."

The official evidence of biographers, historians, and eyewitnesses is consistently mocked. In chapter 3, when Orlando is given a dukedom and the ambassadorship to Constantinople, where he "had a finger in some of the most delicate negotiations between King Charles and the Turks," we are, or should be, on the familiar public ground of the "old" biography. And yet, while the author previously related the details of Orlando's amours and the most intimate of his thoughts, at this stage in the hero's life "we have the least information to go upon." It seems that all the important documents relating to Orlando's career have been destroyed. "Often the paper was scorched a deep brown in the middle of the most important sentence." Obviously, the comparative dullness of public lives is being satirized here, but the author is perhaps making another point as well. In her essay on Strachey, Virginia Woolf had commented on the perishable quality of biography: "Micawber and Miss Bates" she wrote, "will survive Lockhart's Sir Walter Scott and Lytton Strachey's Queen Victoria. For they are made of more enduring matter. The artist's imagination at its most intense fires out what is perishable in fact; but the biographer must accept the perishable, build with it, imbed it in the very fabric of his work. Much will perish; little will live." Hence rainbow turns out to be more durable than granite, just as, in a more famous antithesis, Mrs. Ramsay's spirit is more nearly eternal than Mr. Ramsay's reputation can ever be.

The biographer of Orlando occasionally tries to do justice to the facts, but maintains the pose only briefly. Likewise, he cannot be a servant of Victorian morality; Orlando's sex-change is reported in spite of the blandishments of Purity, Chastity, and Modesty. Even some of the more lively didactic passages are treated half-jokingly: "these moralities belong, and should be left to the historian, since they are as dull as ditch-water." Although there are occasions when Virginia Woolf's own literary mannerisms are made the butt of the narrator's jokes, the interests of the would-be biographer are usually no different from Mrs. Woolf's typical concerns. For example, consider the book's fascination with the workings of consciousness. "'What a phantasmagoria the mind is and meeting-place of dissemblables!'" Orlando declares to herself. The narrator has already confirmed this point by noting the "disorderly and circuitous way" the mind works and by describing in great detail the relations between sensations and ideas. When Orlando's attempts at composition are frustrated by images of his "lost Princess," we are given a long digression on the workings of memory. Later there is an almost equally long discussion of the effects of duration, where we are told that "An hour, once it lodges in the queer element of the human spirit, may be stretched to fifty or a hundred times its clock length." But after noting that the disparity between clock time and mental time "deserves further study," the narrator feels he must hurry on: "the biographer, whose interests are … highly restricted, must confine himself to one simple statement: when a man has reached the age of thirty, as Orlando now had, time when he is thinking becomes inordinately long."

Toward the end of the book, in a passage where the biographer's mask is securely in place, the narrator speaks contemptuously of mere thought. But Virginia Woolf's irony could not be more transparent:

Life, it has been agreed by everyone whose opinion is worth considering, is the only fit subject for novelist or biographer; life, the same authorities have decided, has nothing whatever to do with sitting still in a chair and thinking. Thought and life are as the poles asunder.… If only subjects, we might complain (for our patience is wearing thin), had more consideration for their biographers! What is more irritating than to see one's subject, on whom one has lavished so much time and trouble, slipping out of one's grasp altogether and indulging—witness her sighs and gasps, her flushing, her palings—what is more humiliating than to see all this dumb show of emotion and excitement gone through before our eyes when we know that what causes it—thought and imagination—are of no importance whatsoever.

Virginia Woolf wrote Orlando, of course, partly to demonstrate the importance of thought and imagination. The biographer-persona, in spite of his disclaimers, does not ignore the imaginative or sexual life, nor even those oddly disembodied moments that are so much a part of Mrs. Woolf's novels; and for these reasons the book is neither a consistent parody of official Victorian biography nor a simple satire. The narrator may claim to have the instincts of a biographer, but he begins the book like a novel, in the midst of an action, and his attention is always focused on Orlando's private selves. Obviously, the book is meant to poke fun at the "old" biography in a good many ways. I have already mentioned the use of comic paraphernalia like the mock preface and index, the occasional pretended distrust of imagination, and the abortive attempts at pedantry; more important, instead of a chaste history of the public life of an English peer, the narrator unfolds the imaginative and sexual life of a sensitive youth who is miraculously transformed into a woman overnight. If, in spite of the narrator's fascination with personality, Orlando never seems as fully-developed as Miss Plimsoll or Queen Victoria, that is partly because Mrs. Woolf's characters always tend to merge with the narrator and become slightly disembodied, and partly because her book is a critique of all biography, both old and new. Perhaps at some point she really intended to make Orlando a model for the "new" biography. But from the start the book was controlled by a playful fantasy, and the result is reminiscent of any of Mrs. Woolf's novels: an exploration into a realm where it is hard to determine whether character or novelist is speaking, where radical distinctions and discontinuities (as between the eighteenth century and the nineteenth) are more apparent than real, where granite gives way almost entirely to rainbow.

Ultimately, Virginia Woolf does little to revolutionize biography and much to break new ground for writers of imaginative literature. In a far less comprehensive and ambitious sense, Orlando describes some of the same phenomena as Finnegans Wake; it accounts for vast periods of history through the experience of a single person who, we are told, has "a great variety of selves to call upon," and it openly declares that "the most successful practitioners of the art of life, often unknown people by the way, somehow contrive to synchronize the sixty or seventy different times which beat simultaneously in every normal human system."

In her essays, Virginia Woolf acknowledged the importance of the biographer and showed her deep interest in his craft. But she placed him always after the artist, since in her mind "fact" was always inferior to imagination. To the question her contemporaries and friends were asking—whether biographical and imaginative truths could be combined, whether granite could be fused with rainbow—her answer was always a regretful negative. Orlando is another of these negative replies, since at every turn it is meant to show us the futility of biographical fact and the necessity for art in the depiction of personality.

A similar pattern lies, I think, behind the sexual theme of Orlando, about which I have said rather little because it has been treated so extensively elsewhere. The book is often described as "androgynous," chiefly on the strength of Mrs. Woolf's plea for an "androgynous mind" in A Room of One's Own. Certainly Orlando is, from the moment we first see him, a sexually ambiguous figure; and certainly the author is concerned to show that the "masculine" and "feminine" temperaments are and should be mixed in every person. But could anyone argue that the mind that produced Orlando is truly androgynous, whatever its intentions? If Mrs. Woolf regarded Shakespeare as an androgynous mind and found "a little too much of a woman" in Proust, what must we say of her work? Orlando pays tribute to the active, outgoing character, but ultimately it celebrates an introspective, poetic sensibility. Here, as in A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf's argument rests on the assumption that there are two inherently different worlds, masculine and feminine. She believed that these worlds ought to coexist; she fought discrimination against women, and she quite wisely observed that they would need money to write books. But at the same time she was attracted to the passive, dreamy experiences which she repeatedly associated with femininity. Sometimes she was able to range back and forth between the two worlds of rainbow and granite (as in writing her biography of Roger Fry), but one of her major weaknesses is that she was never quite able to synthesize them. In the last analysis, she prefers one order of experience over the other.