Inspiring Older Readers
Orlando: A biography by Virginia Woolf
Orlando is not Virginia Woolf’s most typical work and it is probably not amongst her best known books, but it is extraordinary, and in any overview of Woolf and what she was capable of the picture is incomplete without it.
It is a mock-biography of an Elizabethan nobleman called Orlando who lives for over four hundred years and who, after a mysterious week-long sleep or trance when he is thirty, wakes to find that he has changed gender and is a woman. It is also a roman à clef and charts Woolf’s love affair with the aristocratic Vita Sackville-West – traveller, gardener, writer, and wife of the diplomat and Labour MP, Harold Nicolson – and on this account has been called the longest love letter in the English language.
I’m aware that this makes Orlando sound a rather forbidding book, and for many years this was a view I shared and I put off reading it. In fact, it is hugely readable, beautifully written, and often profoundly funny. Having said that, it is probably not the best place to start if new to Virginia Woolf. I think it is best come to when you have sampled some of her greatest fiction (Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, The Waves), perhaps some of her essays and non-fiction pieces, and especially her diaries – because in tone Orlando is in many ways closer to the diaries and essays than it is the rest of her fiction. She confirms this herself saying it was written as a “writer’s holiday” – and her unfettered enjoyment and pleasure in writing the book are evident on every page. Conversely, the effort involved in producing her greatest modernist novels caused her immense disquiet, struggle and loss of confidence, often prompting the crises of depression and anxiety that culminated in her suicide on the 28th March 1941 aged 59.
Oddly enough, I began to read Orlando without consciously considering that it might be a novel that is enjoying renewed attention, claimed by some as the first “trans novel”. Well, this is the case. It was filmed in the early-90s starring Derek Jarman’s muse, Tilda Swinton, and in late-2019 was adapted for the stage by director Katie Mitchell. In an age of (almost) unquestioned gender fluidity, Orlando can now perhaps be seen as almost a hundred years ahead of its time.
Except that to read it primarily as a ‘trans novel’ is frankly narrow and reductionist. Yes, the gender aspects are an unignorable aspect of the novel, but interestingly Woolf doesn’t hold up gender as a primary determinant of identity, or the lens through which identity should be viewed. In some respects she often seems to be making the reverse point: that gender doesn’t determine identity, social perception does. (“Different sex. Same person,” Orlando says on seeing herself in the mirror for the first time. To put it another way, one might say that Orlando is about sexual politics but it isn’t about identity politics.)
In highlighting the socially restrictive and oppressive gender roles attributed to women, Orlando is close to Woolf’s non-fiction writing on women in her long-form essays Three Guineas and A Room of One’s Own. But it is important to accord the book the full measure of its richness and strangeness and humour. It is also about a rollicking, invented Elizabethan age (Woolf was a great admirer of Elizabethan, Jacobean and later classical eighteenth century writers); it is a mocking and ironic meditation on the act of writing, especially the supposed ‘truthfulness’ and ‘objectivity’ of biography; it is about love and loss; it is about great, historic houses and the class that lives in them; it is about the interior life and the sensuous power of imagination; and it is about the joy of language. Indeed, one might say that there isn’t much that Orlando isn’t about, for in it Woolf finally discovered a literary form capable of holding everything she might choose to put into it.
Writing about Orlando in The Guardian, the novelist Jeanette Winterson says that she supposes it is the “first trans novel” – but carefully adds, “yet in the most playful way”. And certainly, any analysis of the novel which misses out its essential playfulness and lightheartedness and makes it sound worthy and didactic does both it and Woolf a disservice.
Yes, Orlando is radical in its sexual and gender politics, and it is radically revealing of Woolf’s own life. It is not without courage. But it is not a ‘lesbian novel’ in the sense that, say, Radclyffe Hall’s banned novel, The Well of Loneliness is (published, incidentally, in the same year as Orlando). Woolf’s aims and methods were altogether different, ensuring that even now, Orlando remains ahead of its time. It may be lighter and funnier than her greatest novels, but in its own very different way it is as uncompromising. By all means read it as the “first trans novel”, but also read it for its beauty – of which this is a taste:
"It was a fine evening in December when she arrived and the snow was falling and the violet shadows were slanting much as she had seen them from the hill-top at Broussa. The great house lay more like a town than a house, brown and blue, rose and purple in the snow, with all its chimney smoking busily…"
Alun Severn
January 2020
Virginia Woolf and Bloomsbury elsewhere on Letterpress:
The Death of the Moth & Other Essays by Virginia Woolf
A Boy At The Hogarth Press by Richard Kennedy
Leonard and Virginia Woolf as Publishers : The Hogarth Press 1917-1941 by J.H. Willis Jnr
Moments of Being by Virginia Woolf