Also by Virginia Woolf
The Voyage Out
Night and Day
Jacob’s Room
Mrs Dalloway
To the Lighthouse
The Waves
The Years
Between the Acts
This digital edition published in 2012 by Canongate Books,
14 High Street, Edinburgh, EH1 1TE
First published in Great Britain in 1928 by The Hogarth Press
Copyright © Virginia Woolf, 1928
Introduction copyright © Tilda Swinton, 2012
The moral rights of the authors have been asserted
The Canons editorial board: Ailah Ahmed, Jamie Byng, Liz Calder, Geoff Dyer, Nick Lezard, John Seaton and Erica Wagner
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 78689 245 4
eISBN 978 0 85786 343 0
Typeset in Goudy by Palimpsest Book Production Ltd, Falkirk, Stirlingshire
Virginia Woolf was born in London in 1882. Shortly after her father's death, she moved to Bloomsbury where, with her sister, the painter Vanessa Bell, Virginia met writers and artists such as Lytton Strachey and Roger Fry, forming what later became known as the Bloomsbury Group. In 1912 she married Leonard Woolf and together, in 1917, they founded their own printing press. Virginia Woolf met Vita Sackville-West in 1922, for whom the brilliant fantasy of Orlando was written. She died in 1941 after drowning herself in the River Ouse.
CONTENTS
ILLUSTRATIONS
The Russian Princess as a Child
The Archduchess Harriet
Orlando as Ambassador
Orlando on Her Return to England
Orlando About the Year 1840
Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine, Esquire
Orlando at the Present Time
INTRODUCTION
by Tilda Swinton
One morning, Virginia Woolf sat down to work on a critical piece of fiction and, having first dropped her head in her hands in despair:
‘dipped my pen in the ink, and wrote these words as if automatically, on a clean sheet: Orlando: a Biography. No sooner had I done this than my body was flooded with rapture and my brain with ideas. I wrote rapidly till 12.’
A year and two days later, she laid down her pen, having written the date – 11 October 1928 – as the final words of this, the book you are now holding.
*
Virginia Woolf was the loyal daughter, not only of an erudite and distinguished biographer, but also of his library, her early dependence on which formed the foundation of her entire intellectual life. Her later biography of Roger Fry must have satisfied this debt in a quite particular way. But at this point she wanted to write freely – ‘wildly’ – as an imaginative novelist, and Orlando gave her the chance to split the atom: a fantastical biography – inspired by a very real human being – but essentially a whim of imagination, a wild goose chase. She called it her ‘writer’s holiday’.
Vita Sackville-West was the intended recipient of ‘the longest love letter in the world’, as Sackville-West’s own son Nigel Nicholson described it. She was certainly its primary inspiration. Writing to her on the day of Orlando’s inception, Woolf asks:
‘Suppose Orlando turns out to be Vita . . . there’s a kind of shimmer of reality which sometimes attaches itself to my people, as the lustre on an oyster shell . . . shall you mind? Say yes or no. Your excellence as a subject arises largely from your noble birth (but what’s 400 years of nobility, all the same?) and the opportunity this gives for florid descriptive passages in great abundance. Also, I admit I should like to untwine and twist again some very odd, incongruous strands in you . . . and also it sprung upon me how I could revolutionise biography in a night: and so if agreeable to you I would like to toss this up into the air and see what happens.’
Sackville-West was an object of true fascination for Woolf. She offered, beyond the specifics of a sincerely personal and sympathetic relationship, a kind of experiential harmony of so much that was dear to Woolf at second hand: the maternal abundance of her own – beloved and sorely missed – mother; the liberated sensual life Woolf looked for in herself and found inhibited; the kind of uncomplicated noble confidence she craved. ‘I want coronets; but they must be old coronets; coronets that carry land with them and country houses; coronets that breed simplicity, eccentricity, ease’, she wrote in 1936.
Twisting copious incongruous strands, then, this elegant fictional portrait gives us the Lord Orlando: proto Emo-poet prince; the beautiful, sensitive, brave, lonely, saucy, questing, spaniel-loving toff, with a house the size of a town and a family with exotic as well as indigenous branches to its tree; the romantic who carries in his/her breast through four centuries the life-stained manuscript of his/her one great poem, ‘The Oak Tree’. Sackville-West had famously won the prestigious Hawthornden Prize for her long poem ‘The Land’ the year Orlando was begun. During the suffocating
