EX LIBRIS
VINTAGE CLASSICS
VIRGINIA WOOLF
Virginia Woolf was born in London in 1882, the daughter of Sir Leslie Stephen, first editor of The Dictionary of National Biography. After his death in 1904 Virginia and her sister, the painter Vanessa Bell, moved to Bloomsbury and became the centre of ‘The Bloomsbury Group’. This informal collective of artists and writers, which included Lytton Strachey and Roger Fry, exerted a powerful influence over early twentiethcentury British culture.
In 1912 Virginia married Leonard Woolf, a writer and social reformer. Three years later, her first novel, The Voyage Out, was published, followed by Night and Day (1919) and Jacob’s Room (1922). These first novels show the development of Virginia Woolf’s distinctive and innovative narrative style. It was during this time that she and Leonard Woolf founded The Hogarth Press with the publication of the co-authored Two Stories in 1917, hand-printed in the dining room of their house in Surrey. The majority of Virginia Woolf’s work was first published by The Hogarth Press, and these original texts are now available, together with her selected letters and diaries, from Vintage Classics, which belongs to the publishing group that Hogarth became part of in 1987.
Between 1925 and 1931 Virginia Woolf produced what are now regarded as her finest masterpieces, from Mrs Dalloway (1925) to the poetic and highly experimental novel The Waves (1931). She also maintained an astonishing output of literary criticism, short fiction, journalism and biography, including the playfully subversive Orlando (1928) and A Room of One’s Own (1929), a passionate feminist essay. This intense creative productivity was often matched by periods of mental illness, from which she had suffered since her mother’s death in 1895. On 28 March 1941, a few months before the publication of her final novel, Between the Acts, Virginia Woolf committed suicide.
ALSO BY VIRGINIA WOOLF
Novels
The Voyage Out
Night and Day
Jacob’s Room
Mrs Dalloway
To the Lighthouse
The Waves
The Years
Between the Acts
Shorter Fiction
The Haunted House: The Complete Shorter Fiction
Non-Fiction and Other Works
Flush
Roger Fry
A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas
The Common Reader Vols 1 and 2
Selected Diaries (edited by Anne Olivier Bell)
Selected Letters (edited by Joanne Trautmann Banks)
Street Haunting and Other Essays (edited by Stuart N. Clarke)
A Biography WITH AN INTROdUCTION BY Helen Dunmore
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Vintage Classics is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com
Introduction copyright © Helen Dunmore 2016
First published in Great Britain by The Hogarth Press in 1928 penguin.co.uk/vintage
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 9781784870850
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Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc
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Introduction by Helen Dunmore
The text of this edition of Orlando is based on that of the first Hogarth Press edition, published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf on 11th October 1928.
Ihave in front of me a 1945 Penguin reprint of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. On the back cover there is an Author Note, which begins: ‘Virginia Woolf, who died in 1941, was the daughter of Sir Leslie Stephen, K.C.B., and the wife of Leonard Woolf.’ I particularly like the touch of including the K.C.B. And so the identity of a woman writer is defined as if she were to be passed, mute and compliant, from father to husband.
These are social orthodoxies unchanged by two world wars, and this is the climate in which Virginia Woolf had written Orlando less than twenty years earlier. But between the covers of the book something new, provocative and captivating stirs. The ground of fiction shifts. Orlando: A Biography, declares the title page; but who is Orlando? The first page tells us that he is a sixteenth-century adolescent, and there is ‘no doubt of his sex, though the fashion of the time did something to disguise it’. But of course there is doubt, because this drama of self-created identities and gender fluidity allows for nothing but uncertainty.
Throughout Orlando, Woolf poses questions about what gender is and asks whether an individual can escape the gender of birth. Less than halfway through the book, Orlando the young man does so with
breathtaking ease. He is the Ambassador in Constantinople when he falls into a trance, and on the magical seventh day wakes to a trumpet blast and finds himself both naked and a woman. He looks himself up and down in a full-length mirror ‘without showing any signs of discomposure’. Orlando is female now, but Woolf insists that her identity is unchanged, her memory unaffected. Instantly and easily, Orlando vaults the barriers of gender and begins to explore her new territory.
That moment, that regarding of the self in the mirror to discover the external signs of femininity or masculinity, is one that many will remember from adolescence. We go through a great transformation as the body of a child is lost in that of the maturing adult. Hair sprouts, fat is redistributed, muscle thickens, breasts grow, blood is shed, hips widen, voices deepen, genitals change and acquire a new significance. It is such an astonishing process that if it were not common and expected, it might terrify. For some it is especially disturbing, because these new and strong signs of external gender contradict the gender experienced by the individual within the self.
The onset of adolescence may be fulfilling, disconcerting or awful. It is one of the extraordinary, everyday changes which mark human life. The ‘self’ is still there, memory is unchanged, but the body has taken on another being. I remember, as a child, looking at the large and clumsy bodies of adults with a certain dismay. Why were they like that? Why did they not run and jump and climb as we did with our fluid, curveless bodies? They showed no interest in walking on their hands, or curling up in dens in the corner of a wardrobe. Besides, poor things, they would never have managed it. Why were they so set, so fixed? On a deep level, we all have something in common with Orlando. When Orlando first appears in his ‘biography’ he is indeed an adolescent. It is the sixteenth century, and Queen Elizabeth I is visiting the great house, covering acres rather than square feet, which is Orlando’s
ancestral home. The boy kneels before the Queen. His head remains bent, for he is too shy to look up from the bowl of rose water he proffers. All he sees is ‘a memorable hand’ loaded with great rings that flash in the water. He apprehends something of the Queen’s remarkable nature: her crabbedness, her courage and her habit of command. She, meanwhile, takes him in from head to foot. Her appraisal has force. This is a woman who describes herself in her correspondence as a Prince. She affirms her gender doubleness. She is both male and female, as she declared to her gathered troops at Tilbury, under the threat of the Spanish Armada. ‘I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman; but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and of a king of England too . . .’
Elizabeth I is direct, unshackled, having created for herself a gender in which she rules alone. She learned very early in life the dangers of being a woman among men jockeying for power, and instead she made herself into an icon for veneration. The old Queen judges Orlando for what he is and may be to her, relishing his innocence, his loyalty and ‘a pair of the finest legs that a young nobleman has ever stood upright upon’. She will make him, and he will be hers. And so Virginia Woolf turns on its head the convention about how men are seen by women, using ebullient comedy to underscore the old Queen’s forensic objectification of Orlando. ‘Eyes, mouth, nose, breast, hips, hands – she ran them over; her lips twitched visibly as she looked; but when she saw his legs she laughed out loud . . .’
Who is this Orlando, at the age of sixteen? A young man, teased by every cliché of romantic fiction. His cheeks are covered with peach down, his nose is ‘arrowy’, his eyes are ‘drenched violets’. He is a homage to the woman Woolf loved, Vita Sackville-West, and he is also a sly portrait of the artist who will never have enough talent to match his ambitions. He pours out comedies, tragedies, sonnets, and carries
a wad of manuscript in his bosom for centuries. Pages unreel from Orlando’s pen, as they did from that of Sackville-West. Orlando is in search of love and, more shyly and humbly, he longs to become part of the company of poets whom he so admires, and who will so greatly disillusion him. Orlando’s quest takes him through time – centuries and centuries of it – through space and above all through the boundaries of gender which may seem fixed but which Woolf presents in a supple, eel-quick rush of narrative as something entirely arbitrary.
Orlando is born male. He falls in love with the mysterious Russian, Sasha, who first appears as an enchanting creature which may be either male or female:
The person, whatever the name or sex, was about middle height, very slenderly fashioned, and dressed entirely in oyster-coloured velvet, trimmed with some unfamiliar greenish-coloured fur. But these details were obscured by the extraordinary seductiveness which issued from the whole person.
Here is Sasha, and Orlando falls in love without knowing or caring whether it is with a man or a woman.
In Orlando , Woolf asks whether or not gender is something fixed, and whether or not it must be accepted as such. Her answer seems to be that gender is infinitely more fluid than class or culture. Orlando, now a woman, runs away with the gipsies of the Turkish mountains, but is drawn back by the powerful magnet of home to the great pile where she was born. Orlando may become female, but cannot cross the boundaries of culture. To the gipsies, possession of great property is contemptible and ridiculous, and Orlando’s lineage is pitiably short. They have built pyramids for the Pharaohs and the whole world is their home. She cannot accept their reality and she
does not belong among them, but she can embrace femaleness after thirty years as a man.
Other characters alter their gender without undergoing the physical transformation which Orlando experiences. The Archduchess, who has pursued Orlando when he was male, suddenly strips off her guise of femaleness and stands there as ‘a tall gentleman in black’: indeed, he is an Archduke. There is more than one game going on here, and Woolf juggles her ideas so brilliantly that we don’t notice how hard it is to keep them all in the air. A man may become a woman overnight, through bodily transformation, as Orlando does, or a man may choose to define himself anew through changes of clothing and behaviour, as the Archduchess/Archduke does. Meanwhile, Woolf mocks the captive mind which assumes that woman is the sum of her clothes, jewels, perfumes and lack of education. As Orlando reaches the eighteenth century, she reads this passage by Addison in the Spectator: ‘I consider woman as a beautiful, romantic animal, that may be adorned with furs and feathers, pearls and diamonds, ores and silks.’ She overhears the ‘little secret which men share among them’, as Lord Chesterfield tells his son that ‘women are but children of a larger growth . . . A man of sense only trifles with them, plays with them, humours and flatters them.’
But if Lord Chesterfield imagines that a man of sense can do no more than play with a woman, then Woolf has her reply ready: she will play him, and she is certainly more than a match for him. Orlando is a satire, a squib, a parody, a montage of mockery, an imaginative enchantment with no holds barred, and an unparalleled comedy of that evasive, slippery thing known as gender. It is so original that we are still running to catch up with it. Woolf refuses to be solemn or abstract about Orlando’s transformations. The person of Orlando, whether man or woman, is largely unhampered by gender. He is sometimes mystified, sometimes bemused, but never estranged from her own self. Her spirit
is affected by the spirit of the age – whichever age it may be – but it is never saturated by it.
Orlando delights in her own doubleness. In the reign of King Charles (for time is slipping too, faster than ever) she is elusive, a figure of myth now in breeches and now in petticoats. ‘She had, it seems, no difficulty in sustaining the different parts, for her sex changed far more frequently than those who have worn only one set of clothing can conceive . . . For the probity of breeches she exchanged the seductiveness of petticoats and enjoyed the love of both sexes equally.’ She fights duels, dances naked on a balcony, and listens at coffee-house windows to the parading of the wits. Her inner freedom and boldness survive even Victorian social and sexual shibboleths. In a scene which parodies Jane Eyre, Orlando finds her soulmate on a wind-blown moor, after breaking her ankle. Interestingly, Woolf gives to Orlando the male part in the scene, for in Jane Eyre it is Mr Rochester who suffers an ankle injury and is succoured by Jane. In Woolf’s version a lightning-bolt of passion fuses with social need, because, in the mid-nineteenth century, Orlando must have a ring on her finger in order to enjoy her sexuality.
‘Madam,’ the man cried, leaping to the ground, ‘you’re hurt!’ ‘I’m dead, sir!’ she replied.
A few minutes later they became engaged.
Instantly, in the finest Brontëan tradition, two lives are joined inseparably. But unlike Jane and Mr Rochester, Orlando and Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine are never quite sure of their own gender, and are constantly surprised and delighted to find that they ‘are’ (for the moment) of different genders and therefore a permissible couple according to the laws of the time.
‘Oh! Shel, don’t leave me!’ she cried. ‘I’m passionately in love with you,’ she said. No sooner had her words left her mouth than an awful suspicion rushed into both their minds simultaneously,
‘You’re a woman, Shel!’ she cried.
‘You’re a man, Orlando!’ he cried.
Never was there such a scene of protestation and demonstration as then took place since the world began.
And so Orlando travels on through the Victorian era with its gathering gloom of smoke, fog, cloud and convention. Ivy flourishes and walls sweat with damp. Orlando curses her ‘twenty yards or more of black bombazine’ and blushes at the mention of a crinoline. Her pen blots, and spills insipid sentiment. Almost as an aside, Orlando gives birth to a son. But the child is not going to be part of this story: instead, it is the endless selves of Orlando, one generating the next, which continue to drive the narrative onward. Orlando has so many selves, fracturing, falling from her like leaves. Her long poem is published, goes into seven editions and wins her a literary prize worth two hundred guineas. And yet she knows, in some inner self, that she is not the writer she once dreamed she might be. Now she strides about in whipcord breeches and leather jacket with her troop of dogs, now she sees the past fly around her like a pack of cards.
Now it is the present moment, or, at least, the present moment as it was when Virginia Woolf finished her book. It is October 1928, and Woolf is forty-six. The previous year she published To the Lighthouse, in which, she said, she laid to rest at last the ghosts of her mother and father, and of her childhood. At the end of To the Lighthouse, the painter Lily Briscoe says, ‘I have had my vision.’ She has dared to finish her painting, in the teeth of the seductive wiles of Mrs Ramsay, who believes that everyone should marry, even Lily with her ‘little Chinese eyes in her
small puckered face’, and in the teeth of all those who believe that women can’t paint, women can’t write. After To the Lighthouse, Woolf could dare almost anything. She was married, with great happiness, to Leonard Woolf; she was in love, intensely, recklessly, with Vita Sackville-West. She could be both; she could do all. Next, she would write The Waves. For all its playfulness, Orlando is a very serious book. It is a statement about human capacity, and about daring to reach beyond what appears possible. Orlando may be male and female; may impregnate and give birth; may outlive centuries.
But Orlando’s story ends in 1928. In July of that year, the Representation of the People (Equal Franchise) Act 1928 was given the Royal Assent. Men and women over the age of twenty-one now had the vote on equal terms, for the first time in British history. Orlando has lived into an era when gender no longer defines the right to participate in a democracy. 1928 is not so far away from us: it is a mere blink of an eye. Like Orlando himself – like Orlando herself –we are still trying to grasp what gender means.
Helen Dunmore, 2016
Orlando as a Boy