SOURCE: Virginia Woolf and Her Works, translated by Jean Stewart, Hogarth Press, 1965, 488 p.

[In the following excerpt, Guiguet draws on Woolf's diary entries to examine her intentions in writing Orlando and to assess the significance of the novel to her literary development.]

On December 20, 1927, two and a half months after she has started on Orlando, the first half of which has already been drafted, Virginia Woolf writes in the Diary:

How extraordinarily unwilled by me but potent in its own right, by the way, Orlando was! as if it shoved everything aside to come into existence. Yet I see looking back just now to March that it is almost exactly in spirit, though not in actual facts, the book I planned then as an escapade; the spirit to be satiric, the structure wild, Precisely.

One must note in this passage the three characteristics of Orlando (mentioned moreover in various terms in almost every paragraph of the Diary that refers to it) which yield the whole secret of that work, disconcerting enough in other respects and full of pitfalls for an unwary reader. First and foremost, it is a book which was "unwilled"; it willed itself. Although the element of artifice and tension in Virginia Woolf's novels has often been exaggerated or misinterpreted, it is difficult to deny it entirely. Orlando, on the contrary, is essentially spontaneous. But here again one must not confound spontaneity with externality, as the author herself frequently invites us to do. The externality is entirely superficial, it lies in the manner not in the matter; it is a refusal to go deep, which is not the same thing as a rejection of depth. Orlando is spontaneous, in so far as it imposed itself upon her, its necessity lay within itself, that is to say it was not the fruit of a deliberate purpose or an idea, but an inevitable gesture, an urgent need of the whole being.

One might refer here to that "summa" which Virginia Woolf, like all great artists, constantly dreamed of writing, from Mrs Dalloway to Between the Acts.

Yet it is not true to say that the author has poured all her experience into it, but rather that all her experience underlies it and sometimes comes to the surface. We can see here a reversal of the creative process which demands a reversal of the method of interpretation. Instead of seeking in this work the final stage of a train of thought, the result of a working out process, which should be if not a conclusion at least the ultimate term of a pursuit, we should see in it the immediate data, in their simplest form, the fund of ideas, interests and preoccupations which constitute the manifold starting-points for those explorations in depth, her other novels.

As a joke Virginia Woolf labelled Orlando a "biography". Among those composite titles with which she was always trying to define her books, when she felt them overflowing the frame-work of the novel, perhaps the one that best suits Orlando is, as we shall see, "Essay-novel". For the time being we might suggest "Conversation piece" or "In confidence". Indeed, through that kind of spontaneity I have defined, these three hundred pages are one long rambling discussion in which the author confides in us, now inspired by some chance remark, now in a long development where fanciful wit does not preclude seriousness, now with an exaggeration which is sometimes playful, sometimes provocative, sometimes ironical, sometimes a hypothesis and sometimes a disguise for sincerity, and sometimes all these together. In this respect Orlando offers a wealth of revelations—and it is also extremely difficult and risky to make use of in this respect. Its tone requires a constantly alert attention. After all it is only a book, but we have to re-create in it the author's total presence: the inflexion of the voice, the liveliness of the eyes, and even the gestured and attitude of the whole body. We need to confirm every sentence, almost every word, with some sign that would guarantee its "truth". A book can only be read that way—if "reading" is the right word—if one is intimately acquainted with its author. And even considering that Leonard Woolf himself took Orlando "more seriously than [she] had expected"—should one add, than she took it herself ?—I would go so far as to say that only the person to whom it was dedicated, for whom, actually, it was written—Vita Sackville-West—can solve the riddle of it. She was its point of departure: in her alone it reaches its destination. For her it has its meaning; for us it offers only signs. Let us admit straight away that this is certainly a weakness, the chief weakness of Orlando. If its author, for all her usual lucidity, never discovered this clearly, she none the less felt and expressed it indirectly. In the first place, it is "a writer's holiday"—a release for the artist who, essentially, speaks to the general public—and for this Virginia Woolf felt some reluctance before she finally yielded to it. Then the terms "farce", "joke" recur constantly in her descriptions of the book. But while farces and jokes are never purely such, and this is certainly the case with Orlando, they are always to some extent a closed book to the uninitiated.

However, although this deep seated hermetic quality makes any systematic interpretation dubious and therefore invalid, the novel has characteristics which ensure for it an honourable, if a rather special, place among the author's works. These are the two aspects stressed in the passage quoted above: the spirit of satire, whose verve, combined with the lively pace of the story and the brio of the fantasy, carries the reader along through the paths of history and literature and the mazes of the human soul, all so entangled and at the same time so vigorously drawn that he is continually losing his way and then finding it again, without really being sure of anything. These two traits, satire and fantasy, fun and freedom, comprise the surface but also the whole bearing of the book; they confer on it that vigour and that somewhat turbulent charm that distinguish it from the other novels and yet cannot be dismissed as mere accident, artifice or caprice. Dense and polyvalent beneath the clarity and apparent lightness of its style, Orlando is, both in detail and taken as a whole, more ambiguous and elusive than its hero-heroine. Its complexity can best be suggested by applying to it those lines with which Virginia Woolf tries to prepare a reader for the mysteries of another fantasy which, beneath obvious dissimilarities, is related to her own by manifold and close links:

In reading The Faery Queen the first thing, we said, was that the mind has different layers. It brings one into play and then another. The desire of the eye, the desire of the body, desires for rhythm, movement, the desire for adventure—each is gratified. And this gratification depends upon the poet's own mobility. He is alive in all his parts. He scarcely seems to prefer one to another.

From what we have just said, it is easy to imagine that, in this supposed "Defoe narrative", the essentially picaresque story which the author pretends—without deceiving herself or anyone else—to tell without allowing herself to be distracted from her purpose, is only a pretext and an occasion.

Orlando, born of a noble and illustrious family about 1570, is 16 years old on the first page; in his dress, his actions, his feeling and thoughts he represents the perfect type of those "strange Elizabethans" who yet "had a face like ours". His biographer follows him up to his thirty-sixth year, that is to say until 1928. Thus crudely reported, the fact that the centuries sit as lightly on the hero as the decades may cause some surprise. But when we follow him from the court of Elizabeth to that of James I, from the banks of the Thames to the shores of the Bosphorus, from a love affair with Sasha, the passionate Muscovite lady, to marriage with the romantic adventurer and, eventually, highly modern aviator, Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine—for in the mean-time Orlando has changed sex—we realise, in fact, that time has impaired neither his youth nor his beauty nor his zest for life. All that one can say is that this hero-heroine takes part in the life of each century with an admirable flexibility and openmindedness: that is no doubt the secret of his perpetual youth; violent and passionate in the Elizabethan atmosphere, under James I he blossoms forth at court and then, in disgrace, retires to his estate to brood like Hamlet or Sir Thomas Browne; in Turkey he is more Turkish than the Turks; and when he, or rather she returns to the London of Addison, Dryden and Pope, the interest she takes in these figures is fully equal to that taken by other people of her class. Just as the young man Orlando frequented the court when this was the only place where life seemed worth living, so the young woman Orlando frequents salons under Queen Anne, still in pursuit of the same treasure—life—which at that time is only to be found there. Under Victoria, how can she live? By putting on a large number of petticoats and, eventually, getting married: let us add, "by loving nature, and being no satirist, cynic or psychologist". Luckily this is only a brief interlude: the twentieth century arrives and Orlando collects her thoughts before venturing at last into the maelstrom of trains, cars, shops and society lunches; and she asserts her unity and her continuity in a last symbolic gesture by publishing The Oak Tree, a poem on which she has been working since her Elizabethan adolescence.

It is pointless to dwell on the fantastic character of the hero and the story. It can only disconcert us if we forget that we have here simultaneously a biography, a narrative a la Defoe, contemporary memoirs, a satire, and finally, a fantasy or joke in which the author's verve, imagination and humour are given free rein without any further aim than the fun of writing. Thus Orlando cannot be confined within any of the genres in which it participates, and whatever certain critics may say we have to recognize it as a novel of the same type, if not in the same vein, as the rest of Virginia Woolf's novels. Like them, it rejects literary conventions, and like them it seeks, with apparent casualness but in all sincerity, to grasp the essence of a fluid and complex reality which our habits of speech, confused with our habits of thought, have unduly solidified and simplified. And this is because this search is Virginia Woolf's sole problem and because even in fun, even when playing truant, she cannot give it up. Indeed, Orlando provides the soundest possible argument against those who accuse Virginia Woolf of artificiality and accuse her of wearing herself out in Byzantine refinements of form and technique at the expense of the real and living content of her work. Even when she casts off all concern for form and technique indeed when she makes fun of them in herself as in others, we see that her object remains the same, and the fundamental subject of her book remains the same; which allows one to assert that both of these represent the essence of her being, the direction of her entire inner life, and not simply the superficial curiosity of a sterile intellectual.

Orlando is a biography in so far as the hero's life is consubstantial with history; in other ways it is no more of one than any novel in which a historical character plays a leading part. The Preface leaves no doubt about the element of parody in the work, and moreover the so-called biographer loses no opportunity of pointing out the obstacles that frustrate her scholarship and the pitfalls that ensnare her art. Indeed, she takes a mischievous delight in displaying and exploiting the weaknesses of that literary genre which, being neither art nor science, is only a technique, as she explains more seriously elsewhere. The destruction of some essential documents, the dubious character of certain others, the respect for propriety, and even more farfetched reasons—such as the simple fact that Orlando starts to think—are constantly referred to by the author as excuses for her lacunae, her flights of fancy, her digressions, and even the blank spaces which, in imitation of Sterne, she leaves us free to fill as we choose. And in fact Orlando reminds one of Tristram Shandy rather than of Robinson Crusoe or Moll Flanders. It is not a story any more than a biography. That "on with the story" with which Virginia Woolf summed up the brisk movement of Moll Flanders recurs constantly, either in these very terms or disguised in other forms; but far from preventing interruptions, it merely closes them. If certain episodes, particularly at the beginning when her enthusiasm was overflowing and her pen racing along, flow with the same swift rhythm as the action described, the movement in general comes from elsewhere, being less a consequence of the adventure than a characteristic of the hero. In fact, it is not so much the story as the protagonist that reminds us of Defoe, and one might say of Orlando what Virginia Woolf said of Moll Flanders: "… life delights her, and a heroine who lives has us all in tow."

Another project of the author was to write the memoirs of her contemporaries. The Diary even specifies certain names; the keys are there, but are we therefore entitled to play the parlour game they suggest? The sight of the manifold changes undergone by the principal character is discouraging. Did the author even follow up her original intention? Before starting the book she talks about Lytton (Strachey), Roger (Fry), Duncan (Grant), Clive (Bell), Adrian (Stephen); and since none of these lives is "related", as promised in the same passage, one may assume that this aspect was discarded. A fortnight after the book was begun—that is to say, at most, when she was finishing the first chapter—Virginia Woolf notes that "it is based on Vita, Violet Trefusis, Lord Lascelles, Knole etc."

"Based on" is already vaguer than the biographical narratives announced a month previously. The fact that subsequently we do not read of any names in connection with her remarks about Orlando, may be due to judicious cutting by Leonard Woolf. I believe, however, that it can be explained simply by a change of orientation in the book. The fantasy which, partly to make fun of History, had plunged the author's friend into remote historic distances, was now caught up in the trammels of its own artifice; History had taken its revenge by asserting its authority, and Nick Greene and Pope had ousted from the stage the friends whom Virginia Woolf had thought of introducing on to it. Nick Greene, indeed, appears as a typically twentieth-century figure, and "this gentleman, so neat, so portly, so prosperous", with such definite ideas about literature, is surely some influential critic from the author's circle. But even admitting that this may be so, this portrait which may have amused the Woolfs and their friends by reference to its original has enough comic virtue as an unnamed type to render unnecessary any curiosity about the model that inspired it. Even if he owes to that model his way of pronouncing "Glory"—Glawr—and other characteristics, his fictional identity with the Nick Greene of the second chapter is far more important that his actual status. The hunt for keys may have a historic interest and may sometimes shed light on the process of literary creation; in the case of Orlando it is doubtful whether it presents either advantage, and even whether the data for the sport exist. Later, when studying Orlando as a fantasy, I shall examine the relations between reality and the imaginary world, of which the problem of keys, rightly understood, is only one particular aspect. For the moment I must conclude that, starting from the project of writing the memoirs of her contemporaries, Virginia Woolf quickly dropped this scheme in favour of what one might subtitle "the memory of contemporaries". And the pun reveals the whole distance between a subject which, all things considered, was alien to the author, since memoirs belong to the order of facts and actions, and an essentially Woolfian subject. But before approaching the content of the book, let us finish examining the form under which it is disguised.

Satire and fantasy, inseparable, since they are derived from one another, are the dominant features of Orlando. They define the humour which gave rise and constant sustenance to this "half laughing, half serious" work. In that passage written in March 1927, to which the author refers, half-way through her task, to observe the identity of her achievement with her conception, we read: "Satire is to be the main note—satire and wildness.… My own lyric vein is to be satirised. Everything mocked." We have already seen that the story-teller's art and that of the biographer are imitated only to be parodied. Yet considering that Virginia Woolf believes neither in the continuity of a story, nor in the unity of a personality circumscribed in space and time, a postulate essential to the biographer, there is nothing surprising about her mockery. But she is too lucid and too intelligent to stop short at irony; she dares to be humorous. Her habitual state of tension may make us forget her capacity for this amused detachment; yet all her favourite heroines, from Mrs Ambrose to Mrs Ramsay, have had this gift, relieving their essential seriousness. If Lord Orlando is somewhat lacking in it—no doubt because it is rarely a masculine virtue—Orlando has enough of it to reduce her impulses of enthusiasm and passion to their right proportions. But it is above all the storyteller's humour that compels our attention. It is shown throughout in the mischievous glance that deflates fine sentiments, diminishes grand gestures, trips up a flight of eloquence with an aside, breaks the lyrical flow of a description with an incongruous detail or simply a dissonant word. At every line the writer makes fun of writing, she parodies herself page after page, indicts her own habits—her use of symbols, her exaggerated concern with detail and her excess of imagination, her fondness for interior analysis and her love of words. Even traits which are characteristic of her as a person rather than as a writer are not spared: her changing moods, her alternate fits of self-confidence, enthusiasm and discouragement, the way she oscillates between love of society and love of solitude, between zest for life and despair, between a taste for action and a passion for literature and the contemplative life, even the conflict between her masculine and feminine sides. The manifold oppositions of her nature are an inexhaustible store-house: set side by side, they prove mutually destructive by ridicule. This play of contrasts is one of the forms that fantasy takes in Orlando; the other is exaggeration. This pervades the book, in its totality as in its detail, in action as in speech, in its characters and in its objects. It might almost be set down in figures: Orlando's age is multiplied by ten, and everything, roughly, is in proportion. The list of furnishings for the great house with its 365 bedrooms is shorter than that which inspired it, in Vita Sackville-West's Knole and the Sackvilles: but the figures are inordinately swollen: the Spanish blankets are increased from two to fifty, and so are the chandeliers; the stools from three to sixty, the walnut-tree tables from two to sixty-seven, and so forth. The great frost in James I's reign, the mists of the Romantic period, the Victorian damp, Orlando's love affairs, his slumbers, Nick Greene's vanity and spite, the devastating effect of Pope's wit, Marmaduke's courage, are all enlarged to gigantic, extravagant proportions. One is inevitably reminded of Cervantes, Rabelais, Sterne, Swift; Virginia Woolf borrows from all these masters of the heroic-comic vein. But if the book has the charm and the defects of a pot-pourri, it possesses a twofold unity, external and internal, which fuses imitations and tones down artifice. Exaggeration cannot destroy its proportions; here things and places, time and events are on the same scale as the human beings involved with them. The expansion of a moment or the shrinking of centuries, the spreading panoramas and the spectacular transformations, the ephemeral love affairs and the enterprises that are part of history, all are so perfectly in keeping that fantasy takes on the look of reality—too much so, perhaps, so that one forgets and ceases to be astonished. And on the surface, the same voice is constantly heard, in a self-parody that sometimes seeks to parody others. The writing in Orlando, swift, easy and yet vigorous, remains—throughout all the vicissitudes of the subject—faithful to its spontaneity, to its playful tone, constantly obliterating the stroke it has just set down, asserting only to deny the moment after, creating and destroying its own creation in a rhythm which is perhaps the most profound expression of her whole personality ever given us by Virginia Woolf.

Yet if the style of Orlando, in the most general sense of the term, reproduces the essential personal style of Virginia Woolf, that way of being and acting that is displayed in every aspect and action of an individual, the teeming wealth of ideas, hinted at or exploited to the full, in the form of witty paradox or argument, transposed into images or embodied in dramatis personae, makes this book an authentic repository of the author's thought.

Orlando: courtier, diplomat, poet; Orlando: man, woman; three centuries, thirty years; the culture of a whole nation, the experience of an individual; a family tree, a single being; Orlando is either, or both, as you like. As you like it, not merely because Orlando was born in Shakespeare's day, but because the complexity of a personality is an elusive and incommunicable mystery to which there is no other answer. That is the essence of this book, which is everywhere in it and nowhere in particular; the versatility of the form and that of the hero, the fantastic train of events, the intermittence of the commentary. It is each of these elements and none of them in particular, for they all hold together to express a vision of a human being. And this vision is expressed both through the hero and through his story—which gives us the novel; and also through the digressions and asides that accompany it: which gives us the essay. And I have suggested essay-novel to characterise this book, for its two aspects are not simply juxtaposed, although it is easy to distinguish the limits of each; they react profoundly on one another; thought has stylized the novel, and the novel lends its fantasy to the essay. This explains, furthermore, apart from the other reasons that she may have suggested, the satisfaction that Virginia Woolf found in writing it: her intelligence and her sensibility found equal vent.

Already in The Voyage Out, the human personality was seen as overflowing the narrow bounds within which Hirst sought to confine it. What line could circumscribe the "two thousand and fifty-two" different personalities within each of us? And how can one follow or disentangle the "seventy-six" kinds of time "all ticking in the mind at once"? Here, humorously expressed, we recognize preoccupations with which the earlier novels had already made us familiar. The fantastic, changeable, ambiguous and irrational character of Orlando is merely the diversity that lies within each of us, given that intensification which is at the base of the novel.

The relations of this hero with people and things are disconcerting not only because they emanate sometimes from one self, sometimes from another, but also because they oscillate constantly between the behaviour dictated by the conventions (or as Virginia Woolf would say, the spirit of the time) and that to which his essential nature impels him. One may wonder, as with Mrs Dalloway, if he really is his superficial or his deeper self. And as with Clarissa, the answer is that he is neither one nor the other, but the fusion of both in a rhythm that makes him shift constantly from one to the other—or more simply still, that "he is".

[In Orlando the problem of time] provides both the structure of the book and part of its substance. It is approached now in the form that was characteristic of MrsDalloway, now in that with which Virginia Woolf had experimented in To the Light-house. Space, as well as time, is compressed within one individual's consciousness; and the inward eye that can look back through tens and hundreds of years has the same power of spanning space, from the English Channel to Snowdon, or calling forth the greenness of an English landscape on the arid slopes of Mount Athos, and vice versa. Faced with such confusion (a crossing of the lines) one asks, like Orlando: "What is appearance, what is reality amidst all this?" The riddle that haunts Orlando's mind, and his creator's, is the same as that for which the heroine of The Voyage Out had sought an answer. Here, the cruise is replaced by a dream-journey, but the same instinctive aspiration inspires this illusory quest, this pursuit of phantom figures—love, friendship, truth. And when all is said and done, "is this… what people call life?" And what is life? And does not this fruitless quest recur in each of Virginia Woolf's books? Surely it is the dominant aspect of her own being? The phantom, "the great fish who lives in the coral groves", the "wild goose", the impossible, inaccessible truth, seems to have been grasped by the end of the book, but its capture fails to elucidate its mystery. As in the earlier books, it is an incommunicable experience, the presence of a being wholly comprised within a name, a call, a cry: "Rachel, Rachel!" "Clarissa!" "Mrs Ramsay!" and now "Shel!" And as the whole book has merely catalogued that disparate collection of "scraps of torn paper tumbling from a sack" that each of us is, without ever discovering "the Key self, which amalgamates and controls them all" the answer can only be another, final invitation to further search. Orlando's ecstasy brings us to the same point as Lily Briscoe's vision. Both leave us on the threshold across which no word can take us: yet if we can learn to see and to love, we may perhaps be granted our own "vision", our own revelation.

This central problem involves an infinity of others. Amongst those most closely associated with personality, we should consider memory, which, in Orlando's case, combines with heredity to make him transcend time and space; and above all, sexual ambiguity. Since the brief reference to Sapphism made on March 14, 1927, when Virginia Woolf was planning The Fessamy Brides, this aspect had gained considerable importance. Standing between the feminist preoccupations of Night and Day (1919) and the pamphlet A Room of One's Own, Orlando reveals the living substance that fed Virginia Woolf's feminism. If Orlando's bisexuality is due to the resemblance between Vita Sackville-West and the Hon. Edward Sackville, whose portrait by Cornelius Nuie serves as frontispiece to the original edition; if it is also due to certain characteristics of Vita herself, yet one may safely assert that it is chiefly due to the author's own dual nature. Without entering the field of biographical hypotheses, unconfirmed at the present time by any evidence, and restricting one-self to questions of character and temperament, it is undeniable that Virginia Woolf was compact of elements which an over-simplified conception, largely obsolete today but still prevalent in 1927, would have divided between the two sexes. And the whole of her dual nature gives weight to her assertion of human ambisexuality:

Different though the sexes are, they intermix. In every human being a vacillation from one sex to the other takes place, and often it is only the clothes that keep the male or female likeness, while underneath the sex is the very opposite of what it is above.

The energy and vitality of the hero-heroine suffice, with the aid of the author's verve, to solve the difficulties to which this ambiguity gives rise. In this Orlando really plays the role of a hero, the creator of an attitude. He proves and affirms by being and living. A Room of One's Own, and later, Three Guineas deal with the problem from a logical point of view without being any more convincing.

The difficulty of communicating with another person and of understanding human beings is only a direct consequence of the complexity of the individual. The gulf seems deepened, at times, by differences which extend beyond the individuals themselves and spring from a whole network of circumstances which can be summed up by the word "culture". Such is the case in Orlando's relations with Sasha, the Russian girl, or with the Greek gipsies, but in fact he is equally remote from Nick Greene, whether in his seventeenth- or his twentieth-century form, or from the Archduke.

A special sort of communication, but one which assumes capital importance both for the poet-hero and still more for his biographer-novelist, is the problem of literary expression. The vicissitudes of inspiration, the pitfalls of language, those of imitation, the influence of the period, the bondage of technique, are so many aspects of literary activity which, although the tone and treatment are playful, are none the less described with a penetration and authenticity which are reinforced by many parallel passages in the Diary. We may note, on the one hand, the conclusion that emerges from Orlando's literary experience and, on the other, that which emanates from the book itself, and which is expressly formulated. The first brings out the identity of motive between artistic creation and action: both are directed towards reality, they are the two convergent ways taken alternately by the human being in his pursuit of an inexpressible and inaccessible truth. When he suffers a setback on one path, Orlando starts off along the other. This is surely the same rhythmical alternation we noticed in Virginia Woolf herself. If the motives are identical, so too are the results. Action leaves us disappointed and dissatisfied; and the paths of art do not lead us to the secret that we are seeking:

Having asked then of man and of bird and the insects, for fish, men tell us, who have lived in green caves, solitary for years to hear them speak, never, never say, and so perhaps know what life is—having asked them all and grown no wiser, but only older and colder (for did we not pray once in a way to wrap up in a book something so hard, so rare, one could swear it was life's meaning?) back we must go and say straight out to the reader who waits a-tiptoe to hear what life is—alas, we don't know.

Nevertheless, disappointment and frustration do not mean despair; they are the condition of life itself, its torment but also its driving impulse.

Knowledge, revelation, communication can only be attained in silence. And we remember both that book of silence that Hewett in The Voyage Out wanted to write, and Mrs Ramsay's longing "to be silent, to be alone …"

Every age, in its own way, tries to be and to formulate its being. The masterly portrayals of successive periods in Orlando express the success and failure of these attempts. Shakespeare and Sir Thomas Browne, Pope, Addison and Swift survive not through what they found but because they sought, and because we follow their footsteps on man's eternal quest. We should note in passing the almost total omission of the writers of the nineteenth century, very characteristic of Virginia Woolf's dislike of this period, which in her view was not moved by human anxiety and did not "seek".

One evident consequence of this conception of literary creation is the inadequacy of that criticism which distributes praise and blame in accordance with some textbook rules, and even more of that which studies the author rather than his work. If we can recognize, in the figure of Nick Greene, the attitude of some of Virginia Woolf's detractors, yet her satire goes far beyond these. Basically criticism and all other subsidiary aspects of literature, from the patronage of former days to modern commercialization, including literary fame and that apparently ineluctable phase, the public fate of the printed work, are unrelated to art. For the work of art is a profoundly personal gesture, at most "a secret transaction, a voice answering a voice".

If the relations between one human being and another, and those more special relations between an artist and his public, are neither easy nor satisfying, how much less so are social relations in general. If Orlando, like Virginia Woolf, was for a while seduced by fashionable life, like her he plumbed its emptiness; the evening endured at Lady R.'s bears a curious likeness to the luncheon party described by the author in her diary, November 30, 1927.

Thus, despite Orlando's numerous love affairs and the crowds with which he mingles, loneliness is his lot. Not the solitude in which he sometimes chooses to withdraw and which gives him the opportunity to try out those great themes beloved of Virginia Woolf, the Sea, the Air, the Forest, the Earth, in a vein of parody to be sure, yet not without a secret enjoyment—but the basic loneliness of the Outsider. I may be accused of unjustifiably and anachronistically annexing Virginia Woolf for Existentialism. And yet the absurd, atomized world into which she plunges her hero and to which he cannot give any unity but his own, without even being certain of his own unity, is singularly akin to that of Camus.

I have tried to elucidate this book which, under a style that is "very clear and plain, so that people will understand every word" has indubitably a hidden meaning, because it is at the same time a book, a mask and a confidential message, and one is never quite sure with which of the three one is dealing. However, whereas I have frequently pointed out its connection with the author's personal experience, and even insisted on the hero's kinship with his creator, there remains one point on which a scrupulous reader is entitled to demand enlightenment: the faithfulness of the portrait to its model. Even if the fantastic nature of the treatment and the general trend of modern art may lessen the importance of this problem, they cannot wholly deprive it of meaning.

In an earlier section I reported the little that is known about the friendship between Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West. It scarcely enables one to establish any deeper connection between the novel and reality. Vita's books should not be neglected: Knole and the Sackvilles, already mentioned, from which Virginia Woolf borrowed certain details, and the poem The Land, a few lines of which are quoted as being part of Orlando's The Oak Tree. And it should also be mentioned that certain other characters may, from time to time, have come between the painter and her model, mingling their features with the latter's. Sir John Harington for instance, whom Lytton Strachey sketches in a few pages; a great favourite with the ladies, who welcomed Queen Elizabeth for a day in that vast Somerset manor to which periodically, when out of the royal favour, he would retire to seek consolation with his dog and to translate Ariosto's Orlando Furioso. But these are merely superficial elements. We are forced by our ignorance of the facts to return to the work itself. Beneath the ideological pessimism we discovered in it, it is a paean to life, it speaks of joy. And this joy is not only derived from the artist's sense of deliverance, as she relaxes in easy creativity; it is a feeling that springs from a deeper source; it is the whole of that "singularly happy autumn" of 1927. In the whole of the Diary, this is the only time we find so wholly unclouded a statement, such a completely expansive note. Three months spent writing Orlando, living Orlando, living in him—in her. And one may venture the hypothesis that Virginia Woolf found in her model, and put into her book, not only herself, as we have seen, but her complement: all that was lacking in herself, and to which she aspired—vigour and robustness, a sort of unselfconsciousness and a sort of greatness which her fragility and introspectiveness forbade her. Whereas "twilight and firelight were her own illumination" she gave Orlando a solar brilliance. She loved Vita for all that they had in common, she admired her for the qualities she would have liked to have; she made Vita her hero-heroine, which was one way of fulfilling herself through her friend. If, as is likely, Vita Sackville-West was thinking of Orlando when she defined Virginia's penetration and the use she made of it for her art, this passage confirms the truthfulness of the portrait, unaffected by the embellishments of fancy and the glow of inward vision:

She could also create fabulous tapestries out of her peculiar vision of her friends, but at the same time, I always thought her genius led her by short cuts to some essential point which everybody else had missed. She did not walk there: she sprang.

How, then, are we to judge this book, so intimate and yet so external? If we remain on the purely literary plane we shall see nothing but the artifice, the "fabulous tapestries". And Orlando, considered thus, is too contrived a book. If the author follows her whim, its wayward wanderings are too cunningly traced, and it seems deliberately devised to mystify the reader, even though it frequently instructs while it entertains him. In general, when Orlando first appeared, critics did not go below the surface of the book. Indulgent or sarcastic, they tempered their disapproval by praising either its satire or its fantasy.

Others, at a later date, considering it in its proper perspective, in relation to the rest of her work, have probed its ideological implications, stressing this or that according to their own temperament and thus reaching what might be called the middle strata of the work. Thus they have admitted its serious significance and a certain value which their predecessors had denied it. One might feel justified in going no further, by Virginia Woolf's own comments. Once she had got the book out of her system, her own judgment, as almost always, anticipates with great soundness that of her critics:

… I think it lacks the sort of hammering I should have given it if I had taken longer; is too freakish and unequal, very brilliant now and then. As for the effect of the whole, that I can't judge. Not, I think, "important" among my works.

This last phrase is a revealing one; it stresses the particular, unique character of Orlando, while the inverted commas limit the sense of the word important. If Orlando is thus diminished, not to say condemned as a "work", it may perhaps have "importance" of another sort—that which I have attempted to bring out, which is only to be discovered by probing below the middle strata. But in that case it must be admitted that Orlando becomes an esoteric work which can only yield its whole secret to a handful of initiates. Without claiming to be one of these, I have approached it with all the circumspection required by an obscure document, lacking the context of notes, appendices and references which would have shed full light on it.

Reproaching herself for the futility of Orlando, the author seems to forget that she has been on holiday. Or was it because Virginia Woolf never took a holiday? Already on November 20, 1927, in the middle of that marvellous period of unconstrained writing, she asks herself: "Do I learn anything?" For the time being she experiences only the delight of this unbridled style, and she promises herself to hand over her pen to the artist anxiously whispering over her shoulder, who must shape all this random chatter into a work of art. We have just seen that Virginia Woolf was later to consider this recasting as hastily and inadequately done. In any case, not until a year later does she reply to the question put by her more exacting self: "Orlando taught me how to write a direct sentence; taught me continuity and narrative and how to keep the realities at bay." This formal gain, however, fails to satisfy her (yet another argument against those who accuse her of being exclusively preoccupied with form and technique): "…I did not try to explore. And must I always explore? Yes I think so still." Exploring, for her, means that research in depth through which form and substance are fused in indestructible unity, and which, as I have pointed out, was lacking in Orlando: that research in depth which, for Virginia Woolf, is the very essence of artistic creation and which alone entitles a work to be called "important".…