Woolf sent Vita a special leather-bound copy of Orlando on the morning of publication, 11 October 1928, the day on which the novel’s last chapter takes place and Orlando arrives at the present time; she also gave Vita the manuscript. The first British edition of Orlando was published by the Woolfs at the Hogarth Press, having been printed in Edinburgh (by R. & R. Clark, Ltd), and the first American trade edition was published by Harcourt, Brace and Co. on 18 October, though both this and the Hogarth volume were preceded by a special limited edition, published on 2 October by Crosby Gaige of New York who printed 861 copies and a further 15 on green paper.5 The American edition of Orlando differs in a large number of significant details from the British text. It was Woolf’s practice to revise page-proofs for her British and American publishers independently, with the result that there are more than 150 variant readings. A list of these is given in an appendix to this volume. The page-proofs that Woolf corrected for Harcourt Brace are at Smith College. Some pages of the corrected typescript survive in private hands, several having been purchased by Frederick B. Adams, an American railways director.6
Orlando sold exceptionally well – more than 8,000 copies in Britain and more than 13,000 in the United States during its first six months. As Woolf’s biographer John Mepham points out, it was ‘the turning point in her career from the point of view of sales’. During her lifetime Orlando, along with Flush (1933, her spoof biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s cocker spaniel) and The Years (1937), sold best, but this pattern changed after the war when these titles were overtaken by the more serious modernism of Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927).7 Later editions of Orlando include the Uniform Edition (1933, strictly not a new edition, since it was a photo-offset reprint); the first Penguin edition of 1942, which identified Woolf as the daughter of Sir Leslie Stephen KCB and the wife of Leonard Woolf, cost nine pence and ran to 75,000 copies; there was also an edition in the Signet Classic series (New American Library) with an introduction by Elizabeth Bowen (1960). Harcourt Brace then published in paperback for Harvest Books an edition that, exceptionally, reproduced the original photographs; more than 38,000 of these were printed between October 1973 and December 1976.
This edition is based on the text of the first English (Hogarth) edition, with the following errors corrected (the first reading is from this Penguin edition, the second from the first English edition).
102.34 blank verse poem ] blank version poem
131.26 seem to hint ] seems to hint
218.6 strangers, but a little wary ] strangers, but a little weary
NOTES
1. Diary, III, 18 March 1928, p. 177.
2. See Letter to Vita Sackville-West, 9 Oct. 1927, Letters, III, pp. 428–9; and Diary, III, 5 and 22 Oct. 1927, p. 161. The MS ends with the date ‘March 17th 1928’; see also Letter to Vita Sackville-West, 20? March 1928, Letters, III, p. 474, and the diary entry, ‘Orlando was finished yesterday as the clock struck one’, Diary, III, 18 March 1928, p. 176 (confusingly repeated at the entry for 22 March, p. 177).
3. V. Sackville-West, ‘Virginia Woolf and Orlando’ (Listener, 27 January 1955, PP. 157–8).
4. Madeline Moore, ‘Orlando: An Edition of the Manuscript’ in Twentieth Century Literature (No. 25, 1979, pp. 303–55).
5. Bibliographical details are taken from B. J. Kirkpatrick, A Bibliography of Virginia Woolf (3rd edn, OUP, 1980, pp. 34–8).
6. See note in Letters, V, p. 168.
7. John Mepham, Virginia Woolf: A Literary Life (Macmillan, 1991, pp. 130–31).
A Note on the Illustrations
Orlando is unique among Woolf’s novels in presenting itself to readers as a biography, if parodically so:
I am writing Orlando half in a mock style very clear & plain, so that people will understand every word. But the balance between truth & fantasy must be careful. It is based on Vita, Violet Trefusis, Lord Lascelles, Knole &c.1
In support of this claim the first edition features eight illustrations, plus a black and white portrait on the dust jacket which appears as the frontispiece to this edition. The photograph is of a painting or part of a painting of a gentleman in Elizabethan costume with a large shield before him (on previous occasions Vanessa Bell had designed and illustrated dust jackets for Woolf’s novels). The first edition notes that this portrait (which looks like a modern pastiche) is reproduced by kind permission of the Worthing Art Gallery, but nothing more is known about it.
Woolf began assembling the photographs for Orlando in October 1927; three of these were of Vita Sackville-West, while three others were taken from portraits at Knole. Taking the pictures in order of their appearance, the first, which is also the frontispiece to the original volume (‘Orlando as a Boy’), is the right-hand side of a double portrait at Knole. Painted by Cornelius Nuie, it shows two sons of Edward Sackville, fourth Earl of Dorset, as boys; the younger one, the Honourable Edward Sackville, is depicted here. Vita had also reproduced this picture in her book Knole and the Sackvilles (1922). The second (‘The Russian Princess as a Child’) is a photograph of Woolf’s niece Angelica Bell (daughter of Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant); it may be a collage, as the lower part of the photograph appears painted. The third (‘The Archduchess Harriet’) is Marcus Gheeraerts’ portrait of Mary Curzon, fourth Countess of Dorset, then hanging in the parlour passage at Knole; while the fourth (‘Orlando as Ambassador’), is from a pastel portrait of Lionel, first Duke of Dorset, by Rosalba Carriera, in the sitting room.2 The fifth (‘Orlando on her return to England’) is a studio photograph of Vita, probably taken by Lenare. The sixth (‘Orlando about the year 1840’) seems to have been taken by Vanessa and Duncan on the afternoon of 14 November 1927.3 The seventh (‘Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine, Esquire’) is the painting of a young man c. 1820 by an unidentified artist – he bears some resemblance to the young Harold Nicolson. Vita had bought it from a London dealer and it now hangs at Sissinghurst.4 The eighth (‘Orlando at the present time’) is a photograph of Vita at Long Barn taken by Leonard Woolf, probably at the end of April 1928. Virginia wrote to Vita: ‘It has now become essential to have a photograph of Orlando in country clothes in a wood. If you have films and a camera I thought Leonard might take you.’5
In this edition the photographs have been placed as closely as possible to their positions in the first edition.
NOTES
1. Diary, III, 22 Oct. 1927, p. 162.
2. The use of these three Knole portraits later led the new Lord Sackville to complain that they had been used without his permission – in fact Vita had obtained her father’s permission before his death; see Letters, III, p. 558.
3. See letters to Vita, 6 and 11 Nov. 1927, Letters, III, pp. 434–5. Footnotes explain that three portraits of the Sackville family were used in Orlando (the frontispiece and the third and fourth pictures). A further footnote (p. 435) identifies the photograph of Vita in a hat, shawl and check skirt (‘Orlando about the year 1840’) as the work of Vanessa and Duncan. The earlier photograph of Vita in satin and pearls (‘Orlando on her return to England’) was probably taken by Lenare, since Virginia wrote to Vita, ‘Nessa wants to photograph you at 2, that is if she thinks the Lenare too bad.’ It looks as if, in addition to the fancy-dress ‘1840’ picture, Vanessa and Duncan took some photographs of Vita in the pink satin and pearls that were intended to suggest a Lely portrait because in Madeline Moore’s book The Short Season Between Two Silences (Unwin Hyman, 1984) there is a photograph of a rather dishevelled Vita in pearls and satin, captioned, ‘Vita… posing as a lily [Lely?] in Vanessa Bell’s studio, 1928’. In Vita (p. 182), Victoria Glendinning quotes an amusing account of one of these photographic sessions, though she later (p. 205) identifies the ‘1840’ portrait as the one taken by Lenare, a view contradicted by the editors of the Letters.
4. See Letter to Vita, 17 April 1928, Letters, III, p. 484; and footnote.
5. Letter to Vita, 27 April 1928, Letters, III, p. 488. This photograph also appears in Letters of Vita. Two othe
r versions, apparently taken on the same occasion, appear in Vita (here credited to Virginia, rather than Leonard) and in Nigel Nicolson’s Vita and Harold: The Letters of Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson 1910–1962 (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1992).
Overleaf: facsimile of the frontispiece and title page of the first edition.
ORLANDO
A BIOGRAPHY
VIRGINIA WOOLF
Published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf at the Hogarth Press, 52 Tavistock Square, London, W.C. 1928
TO
V. SACKVILLE-WEST
Preface
Many friends have helped me in writing this book. Some are dead and so illustrious that I scarcely dare name them, yet no one can read or write without being perpetually in the debt of Defoe, Sir Thomas Browne, Sterne, Sir Walter Scott, Lord Macaulay, Emily Brontë, De Quincey, and Walter Pater – to name the first that come to mind. Others are alive, and though perhaps as illustrious in their own way, are less formidable for that very reason. I am specially indebted to Mr. C. P. Sanger, without whose knowledge of the law of real property this book could never have been written. Mr. Sydney-Turner’s wide and peculiar erudition has saved me, I hope, some lamentable blunders. I have had the advantage – how great I alone can estimate – of Mr. Arthur Waley’s knowledge of Chinese. Madame Lopokova (Mrs. J. M. Keynes) has been at hand to correct my Russian. To the unrivalled sympathy and imagination of Mr. Roger Fry I owe whatever understanding of the art of painting I may possess. I have, I hope, profited in another department by the singularly penetrating, if severe, criticism of my nephew Mr. Julian Bell. Miss M. K. Snowdon’s indefatigable researches in the archives of Harrogate and Cheltenham were none the less arduous for being vain. Other friends have helped me in ways too various to specify. I must content myself with naming Mr. Angus Davidson; Mrs. Cartwright; Miss Janet Case; Lord Berners (whose knowledge of Elizabethan music has proved invaluable); Mr. Francis Birrell; my brother, Dr. Adrian Stephen; Mr. F. L. Lucas; Mr. and Mrs. Desmond MacCarthy; that most inspiriting of critics, my brother-in-law, Mr. Clive Bell; Mr. G. H. Rylands; Lady Colefax; Miss Nellie Boxall; Mr. J. M. Keynes; Mr. Hugh Walpole; Miss Violet Dickinson; the Hon. Edward Sackville West; Mr. and Mrs. St. John Hutchinson; Mr. Duncan Grant; Mr. and Mrs. Stephen Tomlin; Mr. and Lady Ottoline Morrell; my mother-in-law, Mrs. Sidney Woolf; Mr. Osbert Sitwell; Madame Jacques Raverat; Colonel Cory Bell; Miss Valerie Taylor; Mr. J. T. Sheppard; Mr. and Mrs. T. S. Eliot; Miss Ethel Sands; Miss Nan Hudson; my nephew Mr. Quentin Bell (an old and valued collaborator in fiction); Mr. Raymond Mortimer; Lady Gerald Wellesley; Mr. Lytton Strachey; the Viscountess Cecil; Miss Hope Mirrlees; Mr. E. M. Forster; the Hon. Harold Nicolson; and my sister, Vanessa Bell – but the list threatens to grow too long and is already far too distinguished. For while it rouses in me memories of the pleasantest kind it will inevitably wake expectations in the reader which the book itself can only disappoint. Therefore I will conclude by thanking the officials of the British Museum and Record Office for their wonted courtesy; my niece Miss Angelica Bell, for a service which none but she could have rendered; and my husband for the patience with which he has invariably helped my researches and for the profound historical knowledge to which these pages owe whatever degree of accuracy they may attain. Finally, I would thank, had I not lost his name and address, a gentleman in America, who has generously and gratuitously corrected the punctuation, the botany, the entomology, the geography, and the chronology of previous works of mine and will, I hope, not spare his services on the present occasion.
CONTENTS
Bibliographical Note ix
Introduction xi
Further Reading xli
A Note on the Text xliv
A Note on the Illustrations xlvii
Orlando 1
Notes 233
Appendix 265
Illustrations
1. Orlando as a Boy Frontispiece
2. The Russian Princess as a Child 35
3. The Archduchess Harriet 79
4. Orlando as Ambassador 87
5. Orlando on her return to England 111
6. Orlando about the year 1840 171
7. Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine, Esquire 185
8. Orlando at the present time 221
Chapter I
He – for there could be no doubt of his sex, though the fashion of the time did something to disguise it – was in the act of slicing at the head of a Moor1 which swung from the rafters. It was the colour of an old football, and more or less the shape of one, save for the sunken cheeks and a strand or two of coarse, dry hair, like the hair on a cocoanut. Orlando’s father, or perhaps his grandfather, had struck it from the shoulders of a vast Pagan who had started up under the moon in the barbarian fields of Africa; and now it swung, gently, perpetually, in the breeze which never ceased blowing through the attic rooms of the gigantic house of the lord who had slain him.
Orlando’s fathers had ridden in fields of asphodel,2 and stony fields, and fields watered by strange rivers, and they had struck many heads of many colours off many shoulders, and brought them back to hang from the rafters. So too would Orlando, he vowed. But since he was sixteen only, and too young to ride with them in Africa or France, he would steal away from his mother and the peacocks in the garden and go to his attic room and there lunge and plunge and slice the air with his blade. Sometimes he cut the cord so that the skull bumped on the floor and he had to string it up again, fastening it with some chivalry almost out of reach so that his enemy grinned at him through shrunk, black lips triumphantly. The skull swung to and fro, for the house, at the top of which he lived, was so vast that there seemed trapped in it the wind itself, blowing this way, blowing that way, winter and summer. The green arras with the hunters on it moved perpetually. His fathers had been noble since they had been at all. They came out of the northern mists wearing coronets on their heads.3 Were not the bars of darkness in the room, and the yellow pools which chequered the floor, made by the sun falling through the stained glass of a vast coat of arms in the window? Orlando stood now in the midst of the yellow body of an heraldic leopard.4 When he put his hand on the window-sill to push the window open, it was instantly coloured red, blue, and yellow like a butterfly’s wing. Thus, those who like symbols, and have a turn for the deciphering of them, might observe that though the shapely legs, the handsome body,5 and the well-set shoulders were all of them decorated with various tints of heraldic light, Orlando’s face, as he threw the window open, was lit solely by the sun itself. A more candid, sullen face it would be impossible to find. Happy the mother who bears, happier still the biographer who records the life of such a one! Never need she vex herself, nor he invoke the help of novelist or poet. From deed to deed, from glory to glory, from office to office he must go, his scribe following after, till they reach whatever seat it may be that is the height of their desire. Orlando, to look at, was cut out precisely for some such career. The red of the cheeks was covered with peach down; the down on the lips was only a little thicker than the down on the cheeks. The lips themselves were short and slightly drawn back over teeth of an exquisite and almond whiteness. Nothing disturbed the arrowy nose in its short, tense flight; the hair was dark, the ears small, and fitted closely to the head. But, alas, that these catalogues of youthful beauty cannot end without mentioning forehead and eyes. Alas, that people are seldom born devoid of all three; for directly we glance at Orlando standing by the window, we must admit that he had eyes like drenched violets, so large that the water seemed to have brimmed in them and widened them; and a brow like the swelling of a marble dome pressed between the two blank medallions which were his temples. Directly we glance at eyes and forehead, thus do we rhapsodise. Directly we glance at eyes and forehead, we have to admit a thousand disagreeables which it is the aim of every good biographer to ignore. Sights disturbed him, like that of his mother, a very beautiful lady in green walking out to feed the peacocks with Twitchett, her maid, behind her; sights exalted him – the birds and the trees;
and made him in love with death – the evening sky, the homing rooks; and so, mounting up the spiral stairway into his brain – which was a roomy one – all these sights, and the garden sounds too, the hammer beating, the wood chopping, began that riot and confusion of the passions and emotions which every good biographer detests. But to continue – Orlando slowly drew in his head, sat down at the table, and, with the half-conscious air of one doing what they do every day of their lives at this hour, took out a writing book labelled ‘Aethelbert: A Tragedy in Five Acts’,6 and dipped an old stained goose quill in the ink.
Soon he had covered ten pages and more with poetry. He was fluent, evidently, but he was abstract. Vice, Crime, Misery were the personages of his drama; there were Kings and Queens of impossible territories; horrid plots confounded them; noble sentiments suffused them; there was never a word said as he himself would have said it, but all was turned with a fluency and sweetness which, considering his age – he was not yet seventeen – and that the sixteenth century had still some years of its course to run, were remarkable enough. At last, however, he came to a halt. He was describing, as all young poets are for ever describing, nature, and in order to match the shade of green precisely he looked (and here he showed more audacity than most) at the thing itself, which happened to be a laurel bush growing beneath the window. After that, of course, he could write no more. Green in nature is one thing, green in literature another. Nature and letters seem to have a natural antipathy; bring them together and they tear each other to pieces. The shade of green Orlando now saw spoilt his rhyme and split his metre. Moreover, nature has tricks of her own. Once look out of a window at bees among flowers, at a yawning dog, at the sun setting, once think ‘how many more suns shall I see set’, etc. etc. (the thought is too well known to be worth writing out) and one drops the pen, takes one’s cloak, strides out of the room, and catches one’s foot on a painted chest as one does so. For Orlando was a trifle clumsy.