Orlando: A Biography

Summary

Orlando is a comic, fantastical biography of an English nobleman and poet who lives from the last years of Elizabeth I to the eleventh of October 1928, ageing only about twenty years and becoming a woman along the way. The book opens with the sixteen-year-old Orlando slashing at a Moor's head in the attic of his family's enormous house in the country. Queen Elizabeth visits, makes him her Treasurer and Steward and favours him at Whitehall. Under James I the Thames freezes in the Great Frost, and at the carnival on the ice Orlando falls in love with Sasha, a Muscovite princess who skates beside him; she promises to run away with him, but on the night of the thaw she sails for Russia, and he watches the ice break up with drowned people and wreckage on it. Orlando falls into a trance of seven days and wakes changed. In the second chapter he turns to solitude and literature, reads Sir Thomas Browne, writes many verse dramas, and invites the poet Nick Greene to his house; Greene mocks the age of Shakespeare, takes his pension, and lampoons him in a satire. Orlando burns all his work except a poem called The Oak Tree, furnishes his house with immense extravagance, and to escape the attentions of a towering Archduchess Harriet asks King Charles II to send him as Ambassador to Constantinople. There, in the third chapter, he is made a Duke, marries (it is later claimed) a dancer called Rosina Pepita, and during a rising sleeps another seven days; while the allegorical ladies Purity, Chastity and Modesty are driven off by trumpets of Truth, Orlando wakes, at about thirty, a woman. She lives for a time among gypsies in the hills, cannot share their contempt for her four hundred years of ancestors, and sails home to England. In the eighteenth century, in petticoats aboard the Enamoured Lady, she learns how clothes change both how a woman is treated and how she sees. She faces lawsuits over her sex and estates, is courted by the Archduchess, now revealed as the Archduke Harry, entertains Pope, Addison and Swift, and in breeches walks London at night with the young woman Nell. The nineteenth century arrives as a cloud of damp, ivy and crinolines; obliged by the spirit of the age to take a husband, Orlando breaks her ankle on the moor and is found by the sea captain Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine, whom she marries before he sails for Cape Horn. In the final chapter she finishes The Oak Tree, meets Nick Greene again as Sir Nicholas, a powerful critic who arranges its publication, wins a prize, bears a son, and in 1928 drives a motor car and shops at Marshall and Snelgrove. At midnight, as she waits under the oak, Shelmerdine's aeroplane comes down and a wild goose springs up over his head. The Hogarth Press published the book in October 1928, with photographs of portraits and of Woolf's friend Vita Sackville-West as illustrations.

Plot or Argument

• Preface

  Woolf thanks Defoe, Browne, Sterne, Scott, Macaulay, Emily Brontë, De Quincey and Pater, then a long mock-solemn roll of living friends and relations, ending with a gentleman in America who corrects her punctuation.

• Chapter 1: The Elizabethan boy and the Great Frost

  Orlando at sixteen, his first poems, Queen Elizabeth's favour, a string of loves; the Thames frozen under James I; Sasha the Muscovite princess, her betrayal, and the thaw.

• Chapter 2: Solitude and literature

  The first seven-day trance; reading Sir Thomas Browne; Nick Greene's visit and lampoon; the burning of manuscripts except The Oak Tree; the house furnished; the Archduchess Harriet; the embassy to Constantinople.

• Chapter 3: Constantinople and the change

  The Dukedom, the reported marriage to Rosina Pepita, the rising, the second trance, the masque of Purity, Chastity and Modesty, and Orlando's waking as a woman; life with the gypsies.

• Chapter 4: The eighteenth century

  The voyage home and the lesson of skirts; lawsuits; the Archduke Harry; the wits Pope, Addison and Swift; night walks in breeches and friendship with Nell and her companions.

• Chapter 5: The damp of the nineteenth century

  Ivy, crinolines and the pressure to marry; the wedding ring; Shelmerdine on the moor; the marriage and his departure for Cape Horn; the settlement of the lawsuits.

• Chapter 6: The present moment

  The Oak Tree published through Sir Nicholas Greene; a son born; London in 1928, a motor car and a department store; the many selves of Orlando; midnight on 11 October 1928 under the oak and the wild goose.

Characters

• Orlando, protagonist

  A nobleman and poet who lives for over three centuries, changes from man to woman at about thirty, and finishes one poem.

• Queen Elizabeth I, patron

  The old queen who favours the boy Orlando and gives him office.

• Sasha (Princess Marousha Stanilovska), first great love

  A Muscovite princess met on the frozen Thames who leaves Orlando on the night of the thaw.

• Nick Greene, poet and critic

  A needy, gossiping Elizabethan poet who mocks Orlando, returns in the twentieth century as the eminent critic Sir Nicholas.

• Archduchess Harriet / Archduke Harry, suitor

  An enormous admirer who pursues Orlando first as a woman in disguise and later as a man.

• Rustum el Sadi, gypsy elder

  The old gypsy who shelters Orlando and scorns her pride in her ancestors.

• Captain Nicholas Benedict Bartolus, ship's captain

  Master of the Enamoured Lady, whose courtesy teaches Orlando what skirts mean.

• Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine, husband

  A sea captain who finds Orlando on the moor, marries her and sails round Cape Horn.

• Nell, London friend

  A young woman of the streets who befriends Orlando when she goes about at night in breeches.

• Mrs Grimsditch and Basket, household

  The housekeeper and the butler who serve the great house across the centuries.

• Alexander Pope, Joseph Addison and Jonathan Swift, historical wits

  Eighteenth-century writers whom Orlando entertains and is disappointed by.

Lessons

• Biography as comedy

  The narrator poses as a sober biographer with documents and portraits, then complains when the documents are burnt or the subject only thinks. Woolf mocks the confident lives-and-letters biography of her father's generation and asks what a life really consists of.

  • Where does the biographer admit that the record has gaps, and how does the book fill them?
  • Why does the biographer find it hard to write about a person who only sits and thinks?
  • What does the Preface, with its long list of thanks, tell you about the book's tone?

• The spirit of the age

  Each century in Orlando has its own weather: the Great Frost, the clarity of the eighteenth century, the damp and ivy of the Victorians, the electric speed of 1928. The book treats literary and social history as climates that press on every person who lives in them.

  • How does the nineteenth century change Orlando's clothes, house and thoughts about marriage?
  • What does Orlando learn from meeting Pope, Addison and Swift?
  • Is the spirit of the age something a person can resist?

• Clothes and the self

  After the change Orlando remains, the narrator says, the same person, but skirts change how Captain Bartolus treats her and how she looks at the world. The book presents two views, that clothes mould us and that something deeper chooses the clothes, and lets them argue.

  • What changes in Orlando after she becomes a woman, and what stays the same?
  • Why does Orlando sometimes go out in breeches in the eighteenth century?
  • Which of the narrator's two views about clothes does the book seem to favour?

• One poem over three centuries

  The Oak Tree survives the burning in Chapter 2, travels with Orlando to Turkey and back, and is finished in the twentieth century. Woolf makes the slow labour of one poem the thread of a life and asks what fame adds to it.

  • Why does Orlando bury a copy of The Oak Tree under the oak?
  • How has Nick Greene changed between Chapter 2 and Chapter 6, and has he really changed?
  • Why does Orlando laugh at the thought of fame?

Context

Orlando passes through English history from Elizabeth I to the reign of George V, and much of its comedy comes from literary history: Shakespeare's age, the Restoration, the Augustan wits, the Victorians, and the moment of 1928. It is built around the family history of the Sackvilles of Knole in Kent and around Woolf's friend Vita Sackville-West, a poet and novelist who, as a woman, could not inherit the house her family had held since the sixteenth century.

Composition

Woolf began Orlando in October 1927, soon after To the Lighthouse, and finished it in the spring of 1928. She drew on Vita Sackville-West's book Knole and the Sackvilles (1922) and on portraits at Knole, several of which, with photographs of Sackville-West posed in costume, illustrated the first edition. The Hogarth Press published it in London in October 1928, with American publication the same autumn; the novel's closing date, 11 October 1928, is often given as the London publication day. Orlando's poem The Oak Tree echoes Sackville-West's long poem The Land (1926).

Reception

Orlando sold far better than Woolf's earlier novels and brought her a wide public. Readers have taken it as a lighthearted holiday from her experimental work, as a love letter to Sackville-West, as a satire of biography and literary history, and as a serious meditation on time and identity; critics continue to debate how much weight each reading should bear. Sally Potter filmed it in 1992.

Comparisons

• mrs-dalloway

  Mrs. Dalloway stretches one day to the length of a life; Orlando compresses three centuries into one life. Both set clock time against the time of the mind.

• the-waves

  Woolf's next novel abandoned the playful biographer for six interior voices, but kept the question Orlando raises about how many selves make up one person.

• as-you-like-it

  Rosalind in doublet and hose learns how differently the world speaks to a youth; Orlando, whose name echoes Shakespeare's lover, learns the same lesson in reverse from her skirts.

• gullivers-travels

  Swift himself appears in Chapter 4; his mock-travel book and Woolf's mock-biography both use a solemn documentary form to carry fantasy and satire.

• the-picture-of-dorian-gray

  Dorian stays young while a portrait ages; Orlando ages slowly while the portraits of the house record each century, and both books play on the relation of art, youth and time.

Quotes

For Students

A reading companion for classical Christian high school students. See the student guide.

Reading Guide

Watch for

• The voice of the biographer: when he claims to rely on documents and when he admits he is guessing.
• The Great Frost and the thaw in Chapter 1, and what happens to Orlando's hope with Sasha.
• The manuscript of The Oak Tree, from the burning in Chapter 2 to its publication in Chapter 6.
• How the weather, houses and clothes change at the opening of Chapter 5.
• The many selves of Orlando that the biographer names while she drives through London in 1928.

Key terms and names

The Great Frost

The winter under James I when the Thames freezes so deep that a carnival is held on the ice; there Orlando meets Sasha.

The Oak Tree

Orlando's poem, begun as a boy and finished over three hundred years later, which wins a prize in 1928.

Mock-biography

A comic imitation of a serious life-history, with its documents, portraits and solemn biographer; the book's subtitle announces the joke.

Spirit of the age

Woolf's name for the pressure each century puts on its people; in Chapter 5 it drives Orlando to buy a wedding ring and a husband.

Trance

The seven-day sleep into which Orlando falls twice, each time waking changed.

Ambassador Extraordinary

The post Charles II gives Orlando at Constantinople, where he is made a Duke and becomes a woman.

Seminar Questions

1. Comprehension Why does Sasha's departure on the night of the thaw matter so much to Orlando, and what does he do afterward?
2. Comprehension What does Nick Greene do to Orlando in Chapter 2, and who is he in Chapter 6?
3. Comprehension What happens in Constantinople, and what does the biographer insist has not changed?
4. Interpretation Why does Woolf call the book a biography, and how seriously does she want us to take the biographer?
5. Interpretation What do the gypsies show Orlando about her pride in four hundred years of ancestors?
6. Interpretation Why does the nineteenth century arrive as damp and ivy, and how does it push Orlando toward marriage?
7. Interpretation What does the narrator mean by saying that the true length of a person's life is always a matter of dispute?
8. Big Question What makes a person the same person across a long life of change?

Faith Connections

• Psalm 90:4, 10-12 (Scripture)

  A thousand years in God's sight are as yesterday, while a man's days are threescore years and ten; the psalmist asks to number his days. Orlando's centuries make human time strange in a comic way and sharpen the psalmist's question about how a life should be counted.

• Genesis 1:27 (Scripture)

  God created man in his own image, male and female. Orlando's change is a fantasy, and the book debates whether clothes or something deeper make the difference between the sexes; Genesis gives Christian readers the ground on which that discussion has traditionally stood.

• Ecclesiastes 1:4-11 (Scripture)

  One generation passes and another comes, and there is no remembrance of former things. Orlando outlives every generation she knows, and Nick Greene's lament that the great age is past repeats itself in each century.

• Sir Thomas Browne, Hydriotaphia (Urn Burial) (Great Conversation)

  Orlando reads the Norwich physician in Chapter 2, and Woolf thanks him in the Preface. Browne's meditation on oblivion and the vanity of monuments converses with Orlando's long wrestle with fame and the poem she buries under the oak.

Logic and Rhetoric

Central argument: A biography claims to tell the truth of a life through dates and documents. But a life is lived in the mind, where an hour may last a century, and it is shaped by the spirit of each age and by clothes, sex and custom that the documents barely record. Therefore the only honest biography may be a fantastic one, and the self it follows is many selves held together by memory and by work like The Oak Tree.

Rhetorical device: mock-heroic parody. In Chapter 3 the change of sex is staged as a masque in which Purity, Chastity and Modesty are driven off by trumpets proclaiming Truth, a solemn allegorical form used for comic effect before the biographer flatly states the fact.

Debate: Resolved: that Orlando is chiefly a satire of biography rather than a serious novel about identity.

Memory Work

Vain trifles as they seem, clothes have, they say, more important offices than merely to keep us warm. They change our view of the world and the world's view of us.

Life? Literature? One to be made into the other? But how monstrously difficult!

Writing Prompts

Essay: Orlando burns everything but The Oak Tree, carries it for three centuries and laughs at its prize. Argue what the book finally values in a writer's work, using Chapters 2, 5 and 6.

Comparison with As You Like It: Shakespeare's Rosalind and Woolf's Orlando both cross between the sexes in dress. Compare what each learns about love and about how others treat them, and argue which work treats the question more seriously.

Medical Lens

Orlando is fantasy, and its medical moments are comic or symbolic. Twice Orlando falls into a deathlike trance of seven days, once after Sasha's desertion and once in Constantinople; in the first, household remedies (barking dogs, drums, a gorse bush under the pillow, mustard plasters to the feet) fail to rouse him, and he wakes graver and with a clouded memory, and the second ends in the change of sex. Woolf uses the trance as a threshold between selves rather than as a case. The Elizabethan sections speak in the period's humoral language of melancholy, and the narrator cites the old idea that extremes of feeling are allied to madness. In Chapter 6 a midwife announces the birth of Orlando's son in a single comic paragraph. Readers interested in sex and gender medicine should note that the book treats the change as a fantastic event and pointedly leaves it, in the narrator's words, to biologists and psychologists; it is not a clinical account.

• Chapter 1

  Orlando's sudden falls from joy into melancholy on the frozen Thames, and the narrator's reflection on happiness, melancholy and madness.

  Melancholia Depression Humoral Medicine
• Chapter 2 (opening)

  The seven-day trance after Sasha's flight, the failed folk remedies, and Orlando's altered memory on waking.

  Altered States Sleep Insomnia
• Chapter 3

  The second trance in Constantinople, a doctor's useless remedies, and the waking change of sex announced by the trumpets of Truth.

  Altered States
• Chapter 6

  The midwife Mrs Banting announces the safe delivery of Orlando's son, in a passage the narrator hurries past.

  Childbirth Maternal

Creative Prompts

• Fiction

  Write a page of Orlando's life in a century the book skips over, in the voice of the fussy biographer complaining about missing documents.

• Essay

  Trace Nick Greene from Chapter 2 to Chapter 6 and argue what Woolf is saying about critics, fame and the belief that the great age of literature is always in the past.

• Poetry

  Write the opening stanza of The Oak Tree as Orlando might have written it in 1586, and then revise it as she would in 1928.

• Classroom

  Build a timeline wall with one panel per chapter: the reigning monarch, the writers Orlando meets, the clothes, and the weather of the age as Woolf describes it.

• Dialogue

  Stage a conversation between Orlando and Captain Bartolus on the Enamoured Lady about why he treats her as he does.

Further Reading

• Knole and the Sackvilles, V. Sackville-West

  The 1922 family history on which Woolf drew.

• A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf

  The 1929 lectures that pursue the history of women writers Orlando treats in comedy.

• Virginia Woolf, Hermione Lee

• Portrait of a Marriage, Nigel Nicolson

  Sackville-West's son on his parents, with an account of Orlando's origins.

• The Land, V. Sackville-West

  The long poem of the English countryside echoed by Orlando's The Oak Tree.