Authors: Virginia Woolf
Now, at forty-five, Woolf was the author of five novels, which had become increasingly innovative in style, as well as a number of important critical essays and sketches. With her husband, Leonard, she owned and operated the Hogarth Press, a
small but influential publishing house whose list included works by such key modernist figures as T. S. Eliot and Katherine Mansfield, along with the English translations of the complete works of Sigmund Freud. Never arrogant – she had indeed had a number of nervous breakdowns marked by severe depression and often possessed a distorted sense of her own ‘failure’ in life – she was nevertheless, in her best moments, serenely confident of her own abilities and continually determined to set herself new challenges. At the same time, having spent more than a decade developing what she called the ‘tunnelling’ method by which she conveyed the interior lives of her characters in such novels as
Mrs. Dalloway
and
To the Lighthouse,
she had every reason to want to take a ‘writer’s holiday’.
Metaphorically speaking, what better companion might she have on such a holiday than the eccentric and charismatic Vita Sackville-West? Where Woolf herself was the daughter of a ‘literate, letter writing, visiting, articulate’
haut bourgeois
family, Vita (short for Victoria) was indubitably a scion of the aristocracy, a class with which Woolf had always been ambivalently fascinated. Where, despite her literary successes, Woolf continually worried about money, Vita was at least putatively the heiress to a vast fortune: although her claim to Knole, her ancestral estate, had involved a complex lawsuit, the place itself was ancient, luxurious and immense. While Woolf had married a socialist intellectual whom she herself once defined as a ‘penniless Jew’, Vita was married to a representative of the British ‘establishment’ – the debonair diplomat Harold Nicolson. Where Woolf was both childless and sexually timid, Vita was both the mother of two sons and a notorious ‘Sapphist’, who made no effort to conceal her attraction to, and affairs with, women. (Indeed, where Leonard Woolf was unswervingly monogamous, even uxorious, Harold Nicolson was as flamboyantly bisexual as his wife.)
In addition, though Woolf was (or felt she was) physically fragile and odd-looking, Vita was sturdily beautiful, with a dark sensuality that she had inherited (or so Woolf speculated) from a Spanish-dancer grandmother named ‘Pepita de Oliva’, who was
said to be descended from gypsies. If Woolf was (at times) almost neurasthenically intellectual and unworldly, Vita was not only a woman of the world but also a woman of action and adventure, who had briefly run off to Paris with a female lover, Violet Trefusis, just five years after her marriage to Nicolson. Despite her famous wit and charm, Woolf was often anxious about her social self-presentation – her clothes, her demeanour, even on some occasions her manners – but Vita had the careless elegance and the offhand air of command bred by generations of power. And last, but certainly not least, where Woolf was a brilliant, driven and ambitious artist, Vita was considerably less talented; although she was a successful and prolific writer herself, she could not have been regarded as a serious literary competitor.
That Vita frankly and urgently confessed to being ‘in love’ with Woolf can only have multiplied her charms from the novelist’s point of view. In a 1925 diary entry, the author-to-be of
Orlando
incisively summarized the traits that drew her to this compellingly seductive companion:
I like her & being with her, & the splendour – she shines in the grocer’s shop in Sevenoaks with a candle lit radiance, stalking on legs like beech trees, pink glowing, grape clustered, pearl hung. That is the secret of her glamour, I suppose. Anyhow she found me incredibly dowdy, no woman cared less for personal appearance – no one put on things in the way I did. Yet so beautiful, &c. What is the effect of all this on me? Very mixed. There is her maturity & full breastedness: her being so much in full sail on the high tides, where I am coasting down backwaters; her capacity I mean to take the floor in any company, to represent her country, to visit Chatsworth, to control silver, servants, chow dogs; her motherhood (but she is a little cold & offhand with her boys) her being in short (what I have never been) a real woman. Then there is some voluptuousness about her; the grapes are ripe; & not reflective. No. In brain & insight she is not as highly organised as I am. But then she is aware of this, & so lavishes on me the maternal protection which, for some reason, is what I have always most wished from everyone.
7
From girlhood on, Woolf had enjoyed writing mock ‘histories’ of the lives of friends and relatives: in 1907 she produced a little work called ‘Friendships Gallery’, a playful life of Violet Dickinson, an older woman to whom she was much attached; and the following year she composed ‘Reminiscences’, a memoir of her sister Vanessa that was addressed to Vanessa’s children. But now, as a mature writer, she had found so intriguing a subject that she was impelled to develop the kind of informal, personal sketch she had earlier dedicated to Violet and Vanessa into a full-length, professionally expert (albeit fantastic and parodic) tribute to a person who enthralled her, a tribute that Vita’s son Nigel Nicolson was later to call ‘the longest and most charming love letter in literature’.
Beyond the personal charisma that Woolf had described with such élan in her 1925 diary, what made Vita especially fascinating to this would-be ‘biographer’ was the combination of erotic intensity and sexual ambiguity that Woolf associated with Sapphism – that is, with lesbianism. ‘These Sapphists
love
women; friendship is never untinged with amorosity,’ she noted with interest.
8
Nor was her interest surprising, for the Bloomsbury Group, in which Woolf had moved almost from her adolescence, had long been ‘radical in its rejection of sexual taboos’, to quote her nephew and biographer Quentin Bell.
9
Indeed, as the critic Alex Zwerdling has put it, the
sexual permissiveness of the group really was extraordinary: homosexuality and lesbianism not only practised but openly discussed; adulterous liaisons becoming an accepted part of the family circle;
ménages à trots, à quatre, à cinq;
and all this happening shortly after the death of Queen Victoria, among people raised by the old rules.
10
Woolf’s sister Vanessa, for instance, married Clive Bell but had a long affair with the art historian Roger Fry and, after bearing Bell two sons, had a daughter by the painter Duncan Grant, with whom she settled into an amicable lifelong partnership.
Woolf’s friend Lytton Strachey, to whom she was briefly engaged at one point, had numerous homosexual relationships, although he too settled into a long living-arrangement, in his case with Dora Carrington, a young woman who adored him, and her husband, Ralph Partridge, whom
he
adored.
Although the young Virginia Stephen tended to be an observer rather than a participant in these unconventional sexual configurations, her own feelings were never stifled by convention. As Quentin Bell observes, for example, she was clearly in love with Violet Dickinson, to whom she wrote ‘passionate letters, enchanting, amusing, embarrassing… from which one tries to conjure up a picture of the recipient’.
11
And, in fact, long before she had conceived the Sapphic tale of ‘The Jessamy Brides’ which was to metamorphose into
Orlando,
Woolf had depicted love between women with special fervour in her novels. Rachel Vinrace, the heroine of
The Voyage Out
(1915), develops a keen attachment to her friend and mentor Helen Ambrose, while Katharine Hilbery, the protagonist of
Night and Day
(1919), and the suffragist Mary Datchet are drawn together, and the painter Lily Briscoe, a major character in
To the Lighthouse,
is enthralled by Mrs Ramsay, the powerfully maternal figure who dominates the work.
Most strikingly, Clarissa Dalloway, the eponymous heroine of
Mrs. Dalloway
(1925), remembers the moment when her girlhood friend Sally Seton kissed her on the lips as the supreme erotic experience of her life and muses on her feelings for women in one of the most explicitly sexual passages Woolf ever wrote:
… she could not resist sometimes yielding to the charm of a woman, not a girl, of a woman confessing, as to her they often did, some scrape, some folly… she did undoubtedly then feel what men felt. Only for a moment; but it was enough. It was a sudden revelation, a tinge like a blush which one tried to check and then, as it spread, one yielded to its expansion, and rushed to the farthest verge and there quivered and felt the world come closer, swollen with some astonishing significance, some pressure of rapture, which split its thin skin and gushed and poured with an extraordinary alleviation over the cracks and sores! Then, for
that moment, she had seen an illumination; a match burning in a crocus; an inner meaning almost expressed. But the close withdrew; the hard softened. It was over – the moment.
12
‘She did undoubtedly then feel what men felt.’ Although this remark seems casual enough, what underlay it – and what would have given particular force to Woolf’s attraction to Sapphism as well as to the fascination with transvestism and transsexualism so centrally dramatized in
Orlando
– was the rise in the early years of the century of the new enterprise of ‘sexology’, whose discourse complemented and supplemented the equally new (and equally sexualized) discourse of psychoanalysis that had now been taken up by so many of the writer’s contemporaries. Where Victorian thinkers had preached that ‘proper’ masculinity and femininity were inborn, that sexuality was essentially immutable, the sexologists and their disciples began to call attention to both the fluidity and the artifice of gender.
Edward Carpenter, an open homosexual and the foremost British prophet of this way of thinking, argued in the 1890s for what he saw as the Utopian existence of a ‘third’ or ‘Intermediate Sex’, whom he called ‘Urnings’ (from Urania, meaning heaven) because they were able to achieve a kind of androgynous transcendence of the narrow limits of heterosexuality. Specifically relating his definition of these privileged beings to the growing movement for women’s rights in which Woolf was herself involved, he declared in 1896 that
in late years (and since the arrival of the New Woman amongst us)… there are some remarkable and (we think) indispensable types of character, in whom there is such a union or balance of the feminine and masculine qualities that these people become to a great extent the interpreters of men and women to each other.
13
And that Carpenter’s views would have been known to Woolf is more than likely, because he had met and influenced both E. M. Forster and G. Lowes Dickinson, two important figures who were closely associated with the Bloomsbury Group.
A theme similar to Carpenter’s was later sounded by the playwright and Fabian socialist George Bernard Shaw, who also connected changing definitions of sexuality with the transformative impact of the suffrage movement. ‘People are still full of the old idea that woman is a special creation,’ Shaw commented in 1927 – just when Woolf was composing
Orlando
– but, he observed,
I am bound to say that of late years she has been working extremely hard to eradicate that impression, and make one understand that
a woman is really only a man in petticoats, or if you like, that a man is a woman without petticoats
[emphasis mine].
14
Thus, by 1933, Havelock Ellis, England’s foremost theorist of ‘sexology’ and a friend of both Carpenter’s and Shaw’s, could succinctly summarize such new views of gender in his magisterial book
The Psychology of Sex,
with the comment that
We may not know exactly what sex is, but we do know that it is mutable, with the possibility of one sex being changed into the other sex, that its frontiers are often uncertain, and that there are many stages between a complete male and a complete female.
15
Recently, of course, theorists of gender and sexuality have sought to make careful distinctions between transvestism, transsexualism and (male or female) homosexuality. Male transvestites are not necessarily homosexuals. Clearly lesbians need not be transvestites. And homosexuals of either sex are only infrequently transsexuals – people who experience themselves as having been born into the ‘wrong’ sex. For Woolf’s generation, however, such distinctions were less clear. Shortly after
Orlando
appeared, Radclyffe Hall’s controversial
The Well of Loneliness
(1928), an ostensibly realistic portrait of the artist as a lesbian, characterized the ‘invert’ Stephen Gordon, its female protagonist, as a man trapped in a woman’s body.
An avowed lesbian herself, Hall regularly cross-dressed, was called ‘John’ by her intimates, and moved in the Sapphic salons of Paris and London whose other habituees included such sexually
rebellious women as her aristocratic lover Una Troubridge and the painter Romaine Brooks, as well as the writers Natalie Barney, Gertrude Stein and Vita Sackville-West. Yet, despite Hall’s own apparently unproblematic repudiation of what the poet Adrienne Rich has lately called ‘compulsory heterosexuality’, the author of the significantly entitled
The Well of Loneliness
gave a tragic cast to Stephen Gordon’s story, describing her as ‘grotesque and splendid, like some primitive thing conceived in a turbulent age of transition’.
16
The bleakness of Hall’s perspective was, in fact, very different from the light-heartedness with which Woolf presented Orlando’s change of sex.
After her male protagonist has become a woman, Woolf observes insouciantly that ‘in every other respect, [she] remained precisely as he had been’ (p. 98), implying that sexually defined selves or roles are merely costumes and thus readily interchangeable. ‘It was a change in Orlando herself that dictated her choice of woman’s dress and of a woman’s sex,’ she explains later, in a clarification of this point, noting that ‘Different though the sexes are, they intermix’ (p. 132). Indeed, not only is Orlando him/herself a multiply sexed being who happily transcends gender because her ‘form combine[s] in one the strength of a man and a woman’s grace’ (p. 98), but her lover and her husband also appear to have available rich wardrobes of multiform sexuality. After Orlando has become a woman, the Archduchess Harriet of Scand-op-Boom becomes Archduke Harry; he/she and Orlando act ‘the parts of man and woman for ten minutes with great vigour and then [fall] into natural discourse’ (p. 126). Similarly, after she has wed the comic but magical sea captain Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine, Orlando affectionately accuses her
simpatico
husband of being a woman, and he cheerfully accuses her of being a man, for ‘it was to each… a revelation that a woman could be as tolerant and free-spoken as a man, and a man as strange and subtle as a woman’ (p. 179).