Orlando: A Biography

Orlando: A Biography

Author	Virginia Woolf
Sprache	Englisch
Publication date	11 October 1928
Publication place	Vereinigtes Königreich
ISBN	ISBN 0-15-670160-X (Harcourt)

Orlando is an influential novel by Virginia Woolf, first published on 11 October 1928. A semi-biographical novel based in part on the life of Woolf's intimate friend Vita Sackville-West, it is generally considered one of Woolf's most accessible novels. The novel has been influential stylistically, and is considered important in literature generally, and particularly in the history of women's writing and gender studies. A notable film adaptation was released in 1992, starring Tilda Swinton as Orlando and Quentin Crisp as Queen Elizabeth I: see Orlando (film).

Plot

Orlando tells the story of a young man named Orlando, born in England during the reign of Elizabeth I, who decides not to grow old. He does not, and he passes through the ages as a young man ... until he wakes up one morning to find that he has metamorphosed into a woman -- the same person, with the same personality and intellect, but in a woman's body. The remaining centuries up to the time the book was written are seen through a woman's eyes.

Conceptual history

Apart from being, at the beginning of the book, a knightly young man, ready for adventure, Woolf's Orlando takes little from the eponymous legendary hero of the Italian Renaissance.

Orlando can be read as a roman à clef: the characters Orlando and Princess Sasha in the novel refer to Vita Sackville-West and Violet Trefusis respectively (see: 2nd section of "Violet Trefusis" article). The photographs printed in the illustrated editions of the text are all of the real Vita Sackville-West. Her husband, Harold Nicolson, appears in the novel as Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine. "The Oak Tree", the poem written by Orlando in the novel, refers to the poem "The Land", for which Vita had won the Hawthornden Prize in 1927.

For historical details Woolf draws extensively from Knole and the Sackvilles, a book written (and reworked in several versions) by Vita, describing the historic backgrounds of her ancestral home, Knole House in Kent. Other historical details derive from John Dryden's Essay of Dramatick Poesie. (Orlando, personified as one of Vita's ancestors — the 6th Earl of Dorset — discusses artistic topics with his contemporaries as described in that book.) Orlando is also an attractive version of a history book on the Sackvilles' noble descendants, their estates, their culture, etc; Woolf was middle-class and fascinated by the aristocracy, as embodied in Vita. (Vita also wrote about these subjects, but Woolf thought Vita had a "pen of brass").

The conventions of fiction and fantasy (e.g., fictional names and a main character who lives through many centuries) allowed Woolf to write a well-documented biography of a person living in her own age, without opening herself to criticism about controversial topics such as lesbian love. While Orlando was published in the same year as The Well of Loneliness, a novel banned in the UK for its lesbian theme, it escaped censorship because the main character appears as a man when he loves Princess Sasha.

Vita's mother was not pleased at the writing of the novel, because she believed the story was too plain in its meaning, and she would call Woolf the "virgin wolf" henceforth. Violet Trefusis's reply would be a more conventional roman à clef (Broderie Anglaise), which loses much of its interest if the reader does not know the background, whereas Orlando remains a captivating novel, even if the reader does not know the identity of the person in the photographs in the book.

Orlando: A Biography was described as an elaborate love letter from Virginia Woolf to Vita Sackville-West (by the latter's son Nigel Nicolson); nonetheless, Woolf intended her novel as the first in a new trend, breaking the boundaries between what are traditionally seen as the fiction and non-fiction genres in literature (so the novel is not only about trans-gender, but also trans-genre, so to speak). This was not to be, however, as the book is invariably called a "novel" (while Woolf called it a "biography"), and is shelved in the "fiction" section of libraries and bookshops. Only in the last decades of the 20th century would authors again try this "tricky" cross-over genre (which differs from "romanticised" or "popularised" non-fiction, and does not necessarily have to take a roman à clef form) , e.g., Flaubert's Parrot by Julian Barnes (ISBN 0-330-28976-4).

Influence and recognition

The work has been the subject of numerous scholarly writings, including detailed treatment in multiple works on Virginia Woolf. An "annotated" edition has been published to facilitate critical reading of the text.

The novel's title has also come to stand for women's writing generally in some senses, as one of the most famous works by a woman author very directly treating gender. For example, a project on the history of women's writing in the British Isles was named after the book.

See also

• Orlando (or a version of him/her) appears in The New Travellers Almanac, a back-up feature to the second volume of Alan Moore's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, which implies that (s)he is the same Orlando seen in Orlando innamorato and Orlando furioso. Orlando appears in person at the conclusion of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier.
• The Picture of Dorian Gray, a novel by Oscar Wilde, is about a young man who does not age.
• Ariel by Andre Maurois also combines novel and biography in his treatment of poet and radical Percy Bysshe Shelley.