Orlando (6 page)

17.
Diary,
III, 31 Aug. 1928, p. 193.

18.
Bell,
Virginia Woolf,
II, p. 132.

19.
Jane Austen,
Northanger Abbey
(1818; Penguin Books, 1972, p. 123).

20.
Arthur Schlesinger, ‘The Role of Women in American History’ in
New Viewpoints in American History
(Macmillan, 1921, p. 126).

21.
Virginia Woolf,
A Room of One’s Own
(1928; Penguin Books, 1945, PP. 45, 47).

22.
Virginia Woolf,
The Pargiters,
ed. Mitchell A. Leaska (Hogarth Press, 1978, p. 9).

23.
Leon Edel,
Literary Biography
(1959; Indiana University Press, 1973, p. 139).

24.
ibid., p. 138.

25.
On Ariosto’s
Orlando Furioso
as a major precursor text for
Orlando,
see Beverley Ann Schlack,
Continuing Presences: Virginia Woolf’s Use of Literary Allusion
(Pennsylvania State University Press, 1979, pp. 80–83). For a discussion of the comparable relevance of the Orlando/Rosalind plot in Shakespeare’s
As You Like It,
see Joanne Trautmann,
The Jessamy Brides: The Friendship of Virginia Woolf and V. Sackville-West (Pennsylvania State University Studies,
No. 36, 1973, P. 41).

26.
See ‘Orlando: An Edition of the Manuscript’, ed. Madeline Moore, in
Twentieth Century Literature
(No. 25, 1979, pp. 337–9).

27.
Virginia Woolf,
A Room of One’s Own
(1928; Penguin Books, 1945, p. 112).

28.
For a more detailed discussion of parallels between Vita’s life and Orlando’s, see Schlack, op. cit., and Trautmann, op. cit.

29.
Nigel Nicolson,
Portrait of a Marriage
(Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1973, p. 107).

30.
For Vita’s own history of Knole and its extravagances, see Vita Sackville-West,
Knole and the Sackvilles
(Heinemann, 1922); see also the notes to this edition.

31.
For an interesting (though somewhat different) analysis of
Orlando
as a ‘deconstruction’ of conventional biography and history, see Rachel Bowlby,
Virginia Woolf
(Basil Blackwell, 1988, pp. 128–45).

32.
Virginia Woolf,
Mrs. Dalloway
(1925; Penguin Books, 1992, p. 140).

33.
Diary,
III, 22 March 1928, p. 177; 21 April 1928, p. 180.

34.
ibid., 31 May 1928, p. 185.

35.
ibid., 27 Oct. 1928, p. 200.

36.
Rebecca West,
New York Herald Tribune,
21 Oct. 1928, 11, pp. 1, 6.

37.
Diary,
III, 22 Sept. 1928, p. 198.

38.
ibid., 18 Dec. 1928, p. 212.

39.
Bell,
Virginia Woolf,
II, pp. 139–40, 118–19.

40.
Zwerdling, op. cit., p. 56; Jane Marcus, ‘Introduction: Virginia Woolf Aslant’ in
Virginia Woolf: A Feminist Slant
(University of Nebraska Press, 1983, p. 2); John Batchelor,
Virginia Woolf: The Major Novels
(CUP, 1991, pp. 16, 18).

41.
Diary,
III, 5 Nov. 1929, p. 264.

42.
ibid., 7 Nov. 1928, p. 203.

43.
ibid., 14 May 1925, pp. 18–19.

44.
Moments of Being,
p. 90.

45.
Elizabeth Abel,
Virginia Woolf and the Fictions of Psychoanalysis
(University of Chicago Press, 1989, p. 45).

46.
Moments of Being,
p. 90.

47.
Shorter Fiction,
p. 48.

48.
Zwerdling, op. cit., p. 327.

The Letters of Vita Sackville-West to Virginia Woolf,
ed. Louise DeSalvo and Mitchell A. Leaska (Hutchinson, 1984).

Knole and the Sackvilles
(Heinemann, 1922).

The Diary of Virginia Woolf,
5 vols., ed. Anne Olivier Bell (Hogarth Press, 1977; Penguin Books, 1979).

The Essays of Virginia Woolf,
6 vols., ed. Andrew McNeillie (Hogarth Press, 1986).

The Letters of Virginia Woolf,
6 vols., ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann (Hogarth Press, 1975–80).

Moments of Being: Unpublished Autobiographical Writings of Virginia Woolf,
ed. Jeanne Schulkind (1975; 2nd edn, Hogarth Press, 1985).

A Writer’s Diary,
ed. Leonard Woolf (Hogarth Press, 1954).

Susan Mary Alsop,
Lady Sackville: A Biography
(Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1978).

Frank Baldanza, ‘Orlando and the Sackvilles’ in
PMLA (Proceedings of the Modern Language Association
) (No. 70, 1955, pp. 274–9).

Quentin Bell,
Virginia Woolf: A Biography,
2 vols. (Hogarth Press, 1972).

Edward Bishop,
A Virginia Woolf Chronology
(Macmillan, 1989).

Louise DeSalvo, ‘Lighting the Cave: The Relationship between Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf in
Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society
(Winter 1982, pp. 195–214).

_____‘A Note on the Orlando Tapestries at Knole House’ in
Virginia Miscellany
(No. 13, 1979, pp. 3–4).

Leon Edel,
Literary Biography,
(1959; Indiana University Press, 1973, especially pp. 134–45).

Alice Fox,
Virginia Woolf and the English Renaissance
(OUP, 1990).

Victoria Glendinning,
Vita: The Life of Vita Sackville-West
(Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1983).

David Bonnel Greene, ‘Orlando and the Sackvilles: Addendum’ in
PMLA
(No. 71, 1956, pp. 268–9).

Ellen Hawkes, ‘Woolf’s Magical Garden of Women’ in
New Feminist Essays on Virginia Woolf,
ed. Jane Marcus (University of Nebraska Press, 1981, pp. 31–60).

Frederick Kellerman, ‘A New Key to Virginia Woolf’s
Orlando’
in
English Studies
(No. 59, 1978, pp. 138–50).

Sherron E. Knopp, ‘ “If I Saw You Would You Kiss Me?” Sapphism and the Subversiveness of Virginia Woolf’s
Orlando’
in
PMLA
(No. 103, 1988, pp. 24–34).

Betty Kushen, ‘ “Dreams of Golden Domes”: Manic Fusion in Virginia Woolf’s
Orlando’
in
Literature and Psychology
(No. 29, 1979, PP. 53–66).

Jean O. Love,
‘Orlando
and Its Genesis: Venturing and Experimenting in Art, Love and Sex’ in
Virginia Woolf: Reevaluation and Continuity,
ed. Ralph Freedman (University of California Press, 1980, pp. 189–218).

Herbert Marder,
Feminism and Art: A Study of Virginia Woolf
(University of Chicago Press, 1968).

Madeline Moore, ‘Orlando: An Edition of the Manuscript’ in
Twentieth Century Literature
(No. 25, 1979, pp. 303–55).

Nigel Nicolson,
Portrait of a Marriage
(Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1973).

Phyllis Rose,
Woman of Letters: A Life of Virginia Woolf
(OUP, 1978).

Sonya Rudikoff, ‘How Many Lovers Had Virginia Woolf’ in the
Hudson Review
(32, No. 4, 1979, pp. 540–66).

Beverly Ann Schlack,
Continuing Presences: Virginia Woolf’s Use of Literary Allusion
(Pennsylvania State University Press, 1979).

Clifton Snider, ‘ “A Single Self”: A Jungian Interpretation of
Virginia Woolf’s
Orlando’
in
Modern Fiction Studies
(No. 25, 1979, pp. 263–8).

Susan M. Squier,
Virginia Woolf and London: The Sexual Politics of the City
(University of North Carolina Press, 1985).

_____‘Tradition and Revision in Woolf’s
Orlando
: Defoe and the Jessamy Brides’ in
Women’s Studies
(1984).

Lytton Strachey,
Elizabeth and Essex
(Harcourt Brace, 1928).

Pamela Transue, ‘Orlando’, Chapter V of
Virginia Woolf and the Politics of Style
(State University of New York Press, 1986, pp. 111–26).

Joanne Trautmann,
The Jessamy Brides: The Friendship of Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West (Pennsylvania State University Studies,
No. 36, 1973).

Jean Moorcraft Wilson,
Virginia Woolf: Life and London, a Biography of Place
(Cecil Woolf, 1987).

Leonard Woolf,
An Autobiography,
2 vols. (Hogarth Press, 1967–9; OUP, 1980).

Alex Zwerdling,
Virginia Woolf and the Real World
(University of California Press, 1986).

Woolf composed
Orlando
in a high state of exhilaration: ‘I have written this book quicker than any: & it is all a joke; & yet gay & quick reading I think: a writers holiday.’
¹
She began writing on 7 or 8 October 1927, and set down the last words shortly before 1 a.m. on the night of 17 March 1928.
²
She then revised it completely, while retaining most of the narrative structure of the first draft (some details of the passages she later cut can be found in the notes to this edition). A number of extracts from the original manuscript have subsequently been published: the first (a sequence from Chapter V that begins with an apologetic note from Miss Christina Rossetti) by Vita Sackville-West in an article for the
Listener
in 1955, based on a radio programme.
³
Transcripts of many passages that differ in the manuscript from the printed text are provided by Madeline Moore in her article on the subject.
⁴
The manuscript remains in perpetuity at Knole, the Sackville family estate at Sevenoaks, Kent, as part of a bequest to the National Trust from Vita’s sons, Ben and Nigel Nicolson.

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

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).

Orlando
is unique among Woolf’s novels in presenting itself to readers as a biography, if parodically so: