CHAPTER III
1. his Bath… Dukedom: Orlando is now made a Knight of the Order of the Bath, and promoted from Earl to Duke, apparently as a reward for his services as ambassador in Constantinople. His hon ours parallel those of Lionel Sackville, seventh Earl, who was made Knight of the Garter in 1714 (Orlando already held this honour – see p. 18) and Duke of Dorset in 1720.
2. the revolution… the fire: these occur in Constantinople during Or lando’s service there, although they also recapitulate the revolution of 1652 and the Great Fire of 1666, perhaps half a century earlier, in England.
3. cheroot: a cigar cut at both ends. Nicolson observes that Virginia smoked them, and often tried unsuccessfully to persuade Vita to do so too.
4. the domes of Santa Sofia: Constantinople had been an element in the novel from its first conception (see above, Chapter I, Note 10). In addition to its significance for Vita, Woolf had visited it in October 1906 with her brother Adrian, her sister and Violet Dick inson, recording, ‘the morning veil of mist, & the stately domes that shine through’ and the great cathedral of Santa Sofia ‘like a treble globe of bubbles frozen solid’ (A Passionate Apprentice, PP. 357, 347). The hills of Pera lie on the further (Turkish) side of the Golden Horn, and the Galata Tower stands on its heights.
5. journeys there alone on foot: Nicolson points out that this passage suggests Vita’s journey over the Persian mountains. Early in 1927 Vita went out to Tehran to join Harold, and they made a walking expedition into the Bakhtiari mountains, described in letters to Virginia, and later in her travel book Twelve Days (1927). The gypsies (whom Orlando joins later in this chapter) in some respects resemble the Bakhtiari tribe that Vita met there.
6. Circassian: ‘from the region of the Caucasus mountains between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea.
7. Janissaries: the soldiers belonging to the Sultan’s Guard.
8. hookah: a water pipe. Orlando’s boredom with diplomatic cere monial reflects Vita’s as described in letters to Virginia from Tehran early in 1927: ‘Correctness is the order of the day, so we never get any further’ (19 February); ‘We’ve had a series of dinner parties, thank you, one of them indistinguishable from the other’ (4 March, Letters of Vita, pp. 192, 202).
9. Ramadan: ninth month of the Islamic year, observed by fasting during daylight hours.
10. the diary of John Fenner Brigge: Woolf uses this occasion to parody eighteenth-century diaries and letters. In the MS, some of the gaps in Brigge’s letter are filled in slightly differently so that the ‘tableau vivant’ (p. 91) ‘represented the masque of Comus by our… English poet Milton’. Among those performing are ‘the bearers of some of our greatest names in England, such as Howard, Stanley, Herbert, Sackville, Talbot…’ (at which point the branch breaks). The masque anticipates that attendant on Orlando’s sex change, while the names of great English families occur to Orlando later in the chapter (see below, Note 22).
11. blue-jackets: sailors of the Royal Navy.
12. Rosina Pepita: Vita’s maternal grandmother was Josefa de Oliva, a famous Spanish dancer better known as ‘Pepita’. She lived with Lionel Sackville-West, second Lord Sackville, and bore him five children of whom the youngest, Victoria, was Vita’s mother. In 1910, Victoria’s older brother Henry brought a lawsuit against Vita’s father (who was also his cousin, and the legitimate son of Lionel’s younger brother) on the grounds that Lionel and Pepita had in fact been married, and he was thus heir to Knole (see Chapter V, Note 27; and Vita, pp. 2, 30).
13. bastinado: punishment by caning, especially on the soles of the feet.
14. red boxes: used for official documents.
15. three figures enter: Orlando’s second seven-day sleep recalls the earlier one, at the outset of Chapter II; a masque of three sisters now intervenes, attempting to prevent her ‘indecent’ discovery of the change in her body. They are dismissed by Truth to the ‘still unravished heights of [suburban] Surrey’, protected by concealing ivy and curtains.
16. let other pens… sexuality: Chapter XLVIII of Jane Austen’s Mans field Park begins, ‘Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery. I quit such odious subjects as soon as I can, impatient to restore everybody … to tolerable comfort.’
17. her Seleuchi hound: when Vita was staying with Gertrude Bell in Baghdad in February 1926 she bought a Seleuchi puppy, to take to Tehran, as a present for Harold (Vita, p. 156).
18. Broussa: modern Bursa, old capital of the Ottoman empire, is on the hills above the sea of Marmara in north-west Turkey. Virginia had travelled out there in 1911 when her sister Vanessa, on holiday there with her husband Clive Bell and Roger Fry, was suddenly taken ill. Orlando’s gypsy guide from Constantinople, Rustum, is named after one of the heroes in Firdawsi’s great Persian epic, the Shâh-nâma (or Book of the Kings).
19. Thessalian: hills in northern Greece, west of Bursa and across the sea.
20. Marmara… Parthenon: from the mountains behind Bursa it may be possible to glimpse Greece across the sea of Marmara, but it would not be possible to see Athens, crowned with the Acropolis on which stands the Parthenon, the temple of the maidens. Woolf had visited Athens in 1906, on her travels to Constantinople. On the sense of the panoramic, see Chapter I, Note 10.
21. withys: thin branches, usually of willow, used in basket-making.
22. Howards and Plantagenets: old English families, the Plantagenets were royal, the Howards merely aristocratic, as were the Talbots (see above, Note 10, and p. 105).
23. Mount Athos: a monastery in north-east Greece, from the vicinity of which women and female animals are strictly forbidden.
24. burnous: hooded cloak worn by Arabs.
25. heavy carts… tree trunks: Orlando’s vision of her home under snow recalls Virginia’s first visit to Knole in January 1927:
… cart bringing wood in to be sawn by the great circular saw. How do you see that? I asked Vita. She said she saw it as something that had gone on for hundreds of years. They had brought wood in from the Park to replenish the great fires like this for centuries: & her ancestresses had walked so on the snow with their great dogs bounding by them. All the centuries seemed lit up, the past expressive, articulate; not dumb & forgotten…
(23 January 1927, Diary, III, p. 125.)
CHAPTER IV
1. paduasoy: strong corded silk, much worn in the eighteenth century.
2. shiver: a tiny piece, a shaving (echoing Orlando’s ‘delicious tremor’).
3. pkasaunce: a pleasure ground.
4. like a Guy Fawkes: the effigy of Guy Fawkes (who conspired against James I) is burnt on 5 November, i.e. ‘grotesquely or absurdly dressed’.
5. samphire gatherers: samphire is a kind of edible seaweed. This sen tence echoes Edgar’s account of Dover cliffs in King Lear (IV. vi. 14–15):
Half way down
Hangs one that gathers samphire, dreadful trade!
The phrase ‘mopping and mowing’ (i.e. making faces) is also used by Edgar who, disguised as mad Tom, refers to the demon ‘Flibbertigibbit, of mopping and mowing’ (IV. i. 61–2). Lionel, first Duke of Dorset, appears in a view of Dover Castle by John Wootton (1727), which was hanging on the great staircase at Knole (Phillips, II, p. 417).
6. So good-bye… half Yorkshire: ‘Ladies of Spain’ is a sea shanty. Half Yorkshire is an indirect allusion to the extensive estates of Henry Lascelles, figured in the story as the Archduchess Harriet (Nicolson; see below, Note 20).
7. a dome… poet’s forehead: the dome of St Paul’s (rebuilt by Christopher Wren after the Great Fire of 1666) reminds Orlando of the forehead of Shakespeare (glimpsed on p. 16). For Woolf, ‘Shakespeare was androgynous’ (A Room of One’s Own, 1928; Penguin Books, 1945, p. 97), and this seems to calm Orlando’s anxieties about her female-ness. Thoughts of Shakespeare’s ‘great lines’ lead on to those of the seventeenth-century poet John Milton, whose style suggests a cathed ral bell, ringing inside Orlando’s mind – and perhaps outside too.
8. orgulous, undulant, s
uperb: these Latinate words suggest the neoclassical style, just then coming into fashion. Both ‘orgulous’ and ‘superb’ mean proud or exalted; ‘undulant’ means rising and falling like (or on) waves.
9. the Cocoa Tree… Papists: the Cocoa Tree was strictly a chocolate (rather than a coffee) house, at 64 St James’s Street; around 1745 it became a centre for Jacobites (who would largely have been Pap ists, i.e. Catholic sympathizers). At this time political activists and men of letters met at (particular) coffee houses. John Dryden (1631–1700) was the leading Restoration poet and later in life a Catholic convert (i.e. a Papist). Joseph Addison (1672–1719) was an essayist and an Anglican. He was lampooned by Alexander Pope (1688–1744), also a Catholic. There were portraits of Dryden and Pope in the Poets’ Parlour at Knole, and one of Addison in the Leicester Gallery (Phillips, II, pp. 439, 433). Dryden was a fre quent visitor and a close friend and beneficiary of Charles Sackville, the sixth Earl, to whom he dedicated his Essay of Dramatic Poesy; Pope wrote an epitaph for the Earl’s monument at Withy-ham (Knole, pp. 144–5, 151).
10. home in Blackfriars… suits: the Sackvilles owned Dorset House at Blackfriars (now demolished), and Vita’s mother had lived there at one time (Nicolson). Bow Street Runners were policemen, named after the Bow Street law courts, near Covent Garden. The case against Orlando parallels the ‘Pepita’ case, brought against Lionel Sackville-West by his illegitimate cousin Henry in 1910 (see above, Chapter III, Note 12).
11. in Chancery: under the jurisdiction of the Lord Chancellor for the duration of the case. Chancery lawsuits were those that could not be resolved in the regular courts; the Chancellor’s court was notori ously slow.
12. Mrs. Grimsditch, Mr. Dupper… Canute: see Chapter II, Notes 3, 35.
13. the arras… pot-pourri: see Chapter I, Notes 4, 30; Chapter II, Notes 34, 35, 36. One particular silver hair brush in the King’s Bedroom was supposed to have belonged to King James (though later editions of Knole dismiss this); Knole had a special recipe for pot-pourri, derived from Lady Betty Germain, a friend of the first Duchess of Dorset, whose portrait hung in the bedroom named after her (Knole, p. 172).
14. the Prayer Book.… Royal blood: the prayer book of the executed Mary Queen of Scots is in the Chapel at Knole (Nicolson; and see above, Chapter I, Note 14).
15. that doctor…Browne: see above, Chapter II, Note 5.
16. High battlements of thought: in her letter thanking Virginia for Orlando, Vita wrote, ‘There are a dozen details I should like to go into… phrases scattered about (particularly one on p. 160 [p. 124] begin ning “High battlements of thought, etc.” which is just what you did for me)…’ (11 October 1928, Letters of Vita, p. 305.)
17. Hair,pastry… dissemblables: dissemblables, the antithesis of’semblables’, are things unlike one another. For an earlier ‘humane jumble’, see Chapter II, p. 55.
18. that obscene vulture: is lust (see p. 82), though whether felt by Orlando for the Archduchess or by the Archduchess herself remains obscure.
19. twenty million… gape: Lord Lascelles inherited Harewood House and large estates (and income from them) in Yorkshire (Nicolson; and Vita, pp. 49, 50). The Archduke seems particularly concerned with the opportunities for hunting on his estates; the gape is a disease of poultry; ‘the does slipped their young’, means they mis carried or gave premature birth to them.
20. the Archduke… up again: on his lack of conversation see above, Chapter II, Note 39.
21. Fly Loo: loo is a card game in which penalties are paid into a pool. Fly Loo, played at Knole, seems to involve betting on which sugar lump the flies will settle. Apparently Vita did once win by gluing a dead fly to a lump of sugar (Nicolson).
22. dipping sheep… scab: the summer section of Vita’s poem The Land (Orlando’s ‘The Oak Tree’) describes the process of sheep washing or dipping. The scab is a skin disease.
23. so dark… so soft: cf. Ben Jonson’s ‘Celebration of Charis, IV, Her triumph’: ‘O so white! O so soft! O so sweet is she!’
24. a drop falling or a fountain rising: important images for Woolf: a fountain of joy rises, at different times, for Mrs Ramsay, Lily Briscoe and Cam in To the Lighthouse (1927), while the gathering and falling drop haunts Bernard in The Waves (1931).
25. off she drove: in the MS this passage is followed by a description of Orlando’s house at Blackfriars (see above, Note 10), which is rather underfurnished, though the library is well-stocked, and includes Ariosto, as well as The Faerie Queene, Montaigne and many Eliza bethan plays.
26. if the reader… her face: the picture on p. 111 of Vita holding a scarf over her shoulders was probably taken by Lenare in the summer of 1927 (see letter to Vita, 30 Oct. 1927, Letters, III, p. 434). There are two ‘photographs’ of Orlando dressed as a man: ‘as a Boy’ (the frontispiece) and ‘as Ambassador’ (p. 87), but as his hands are invisible in the second portrait, this passage probably refers to the frontispiece. The much quoted notion that ‘it is clothes that wear us and not we them’ exposes the artifice of gender roles.
27. if Orlando was a woman: Nicolson points out that the details of Orlando’s behaviour in this paragraph are all applicable to Vita, who dressed fast, drove fast and maintained that, since the south was downhill, the Nile must flow uphill.
28. the heroine of the celebrated lawsuit: according to Nicolson, this is connected not to the ‘Pepita’ case of 1910 (see above, Chapter III, Note 12) but to another much publicized lawsuit of 1913 brought against Vita’s mother concerning a legacy left her by John Murray Scott, in which Vita was called to give evidence (Vita, pp. 57–8).
29. billets: short informal letters, or notes.
30. routs: large evening parties, receptions.
31. the reign of Queen Anne: 1702–14.
32. her spaniel Pippin: the actual name of Vita’s spaniel (Nicolson).
33. great writer… invisible: this idea also occurs in Henry James’s short story ‘The Private Life’ (1892), which Woolf read in 1921, and took some notes on in preparation for writing a review of James’s ghost stories, though she did not in the end mention it (CE, I, pp. 28696).
34. Madame du Deffand: (1697–1780), a French aristocrat and wit, she corresponded with Voltaire and Horace Walpole, and was hostess to a salon of well-known writers and philosophers. Her celebrated witticism, the ‘mot de Saint Denis’ (see the next paragraph), con cerns the legend that St Denis had walked two leagues carrying his head in his hands: ‘la distance n’y fait rien; il n’j a que le premier pas qui coûte.’ (The distance is nothing; it is only the first step which is difficult.)
35. our modern Sibyl: a sly reference to the London hostess Lady Sibyl Colefax who lionized Woolf and whom she associates in her diary with the ‘party consciousness’ (27 April 1925, Diary, III, p. 13).
36. Link-boys: carried torches (links). South Audley Street is in Mayfair, behind Park Lane, and on its corner stands Chesterfield House, built for Lord Chesterfield (see Note 44, below) in 1750. In 1927 it was occupied by Lord Lascelles and Princess Mary.
37. Piccadilly Circus… her own sex: Woolf regularly associated Piccadilly with prostitutes and therefore with the evils of patriarchy, though later in this chapter there is a lighter portrayal of their way of life.
38. the Rape of the Lock … at a ball: these lines are from Pope’s The Rape of the ‘Lock (1714), canto II, 105–9.
39. congee: bow made when leaving.
40. Addison… Spectator: Addison wrote essays both for the Spectator and the Tatler. This passage is in fact from the Tatler (116, Thurs day 5 Jan., 1710) and is the final paragraph of a case brought against the hooped petticoat. A tippet is a cape or scarf, a muff is a cylindrical covering for keeping the hands warm, and both were often made of fur or feathers. This passage, like the quotation from Pope, continues the emphasis on the limitations imposed on women, which is one of the central themes of this chapter.
41. Swift… Gulliver’s Travels: (1726); the quotation is from the fourth book, ‘A Voyage to the Houyh
nhnms’ (a society of rational horses), Chapter X. Swift’s Journal to Stella, partly written in a private code, is referred to in the phrase, ‘talks baby language to a girl’. Swift was a friend of Lady Betty Germain (see above, Note 13) and his portrait hung in her room (Phillips, II, p. 426).
42. the Round Parlour: at Knole, the Poets’ Parlour (also known as the Round Parlour or the Dining Room) is hung with portraits of the sixth Earl’s (Charles Sackville’s) literary friends, including Dryden and Pope (Knole, pp. 148–9; and see above, Note 9).
43. plates at dinner. ‘It is also related that Dryden, when dining with Dorset, found a hundred-pound note hidden under his plate’ (Knole, p. 149).
44. Lord Chesterfield: (1694–1773) Chesterfield was a friend of Pope, but disliked by Dr Johnson. This slightly misquoted piece of misogyny (he actually wrote, ‘Women, then, are only children…’) is from his posthumous Letters to his Son (5 September 1748; published 1774). A pastel portrait of Lord Chesterfield hung in the sitting-room at Knole (Phillips, II, p. 437). In the MS this passage is both more oblique and more openly critical of Chesterfield, who is classed with Mr Arnold Bennett, Mr Desmond McCarthy and Mr Orlo Williams as among ‘the most illustrious of the tribe of masculinists’ (on these, see A Woman’s Essays, Penguin Books, 1992, pp. 30–38). She adds that Chesterfield ‘forgot that children some times see things which their elders try to keep hidden. He forgot too that children grow up.’
45. Mr. Pope… of Women: Pope’s second Epistle, ‘To a Lady: of the Characters of Women’ (1735), includes several satirical portraits of contemporaries, though Woolf probably had in mind the opening lines: