would you—I’m rather excited about Orlando tonight: have been lying by the fire and making up the last chapter. [Woolf 1978b, pp. 442-443] Woolf was known in her circle for her inquisitive and mocking interactions with friends and acquaintances (Woolf 1937). She approaches Orlando as a joke, as satire (Woolf 1980). But although there is humor and fancy and love in the story, there is also hatred and aggression (Raitt 1993). By writing a book in which the central joke is that Orlando/Vita changes sex, from male to female, Woolf exposes Vita’s ambiguous gender and sexuality at a time when gender and gender identity were binary, and lesbian relationships completely invisible. Ten years before, Vita had written Challenge (1923), a thinly disguised version of her affair with Violet Trefusis. Both Vita’s family and Violet’s family were horrified at the potential public exposure, and although the book was published in the United States in 1924, Vita withdrew Challenge from publication in England (Glendinning 1983). Orlando was published not quite three months after Radclyffe Hall’s controversial lesbian novel, The Well of Loneliness (1928). In August 1928, the editor of the Sunday Express attacked Hall’s novel as morally poisonous, presumably in a scandalmongering attempt to sell newspapers. Hall’s English publisher stopped printing the novel and the British Home Secretary, an evangelical moralist, issued orders for the book to be seized. Woolf and other prominent British intellectuals protested the suppression of the book, but their defense of Hall was muted in the face of institutionalized homophobia, hostile governmental manipulation of the law, and their own awkwardness with the subject of same-sex relationships. Woolf attended the obscenity trial of The Well of Loneliness, prepared to be called as an expert witness on its literary merit. On November 16, 1928, Judge Chartres Biron of the Bow Street Magistrates Court banned The Well of Loneliness for obscenity and ordered it destroyed (Souhami 1999). Woolf was playing with fire in publishing Orlando in the midst of this public attack on lesbian literature, outing both Vita and herself. She was heedless of the possible consequences, hoping the tone of joking fantasy would hold off any legal or social repercussions. Woolf believed that their relationship would cease when Vita received her copy of Orlando: “11th Oct. sees the end of our romance” (Woolf 1978b, p. 515). On first reading Orlando, Vita wrote to Woolf, “I am completely dazzled, bewitched, enchanted, under a spell,” and “shaken quite out of my wits.” She added a postscript, “You made me cry with your passages about Knole, you wretch” (Sackville-West 1985, pp. 288-289). Woolf quickly wrote back, “What an immense relief! I was half sick with fright till your telegram came. It struck me suddenly with horror that you’d be hurt or angry” (Woolf 1978b, p. 544). Vita’s private reaction to her husband was more reserved, and that letter is curiously left out of the compilation of their letters edited by their son, Nigel Nicolson (Sackville-West 1992). In her letter to Harold, Vita said that Woolf “slightly confused the issues in making Orlando 1) marry, 2) have a child. Shelmerdine does not really contribute
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