Authors: Virginia Woolf
Tupper,
198
Tyrconnel, the Lady Margaret,
29
Vere, Lord Francis,
27
Williams, Mrs.,
154
Wren, Christopher,
149
THE END
Orlando
is a
roman à clef,
written to entertain and also perhaps to comfort Vita Sackville-West. It is full of knowing detail about Knole, the Sackvilles’ ancestral home near Sevenoaks where Vita had grown up and from which she was finally exiled when her father died in January 1928, during the writing of
Orlando.
Part of Woolf’s intention was the re-creation, within the novel, of the home that Vita had lost, and much of the information she used was drawn from Vita’s account of it in
Knole.
But Woolf had also visited Knole, and had listened attentively to Vita talking about her love for it. For that reason, these notes also draw on Vita’s expanded fourth edition of
Knole
(1958) as well as on Charles J. Phillips’s two-volume
History of the Sackville Family
(1930) (hereafter,
Phillips
) which also provides a
catalogue raisonné
of the paintings and drawings in the house at that time. In writing
Orlando,
Virginia accepted Vita’s view of the Sackvilles that ‘their inter est lay in their being so representative. From generation to generation they might stand, fully equipped, as portraits from English history’ (
Knole,
p. 28).
In what follows, further material has been taken from Woolf’s own
Letters
and
Diary,
from Victoria Glendinning’s biography,
Vita
(1983), and from the
Letters of Vita.
On the MS, see ‘Orlando: An Edition of the Manuscript’ (ed. Madeline Moore,
Twentieth Century Literature,
25, 1979, PP. 303–55). Much the most important single source of information has been Nigel Nicolson, who annotated a volume of
Orlando
for our text editor, Brenda Lyons, especially for this edition; we would like to thank him particularly warmly for all his help. In addition, Sandra Gilbert would like to express her deep gratitude to Susan Fox for invaluable research assistance.
The list of contributors in the preface, which includes many of Woolf’s favourite authors, as well as her friends, is part of the joke begun when she subtitled
Orlando,
‘A Biography’ (see
Letters,
III, pp. 493, 547, 554, where she asks her nephew Quentin Bell, Hugh Walpole and Charles Sanger for permission to use their names here).
1.
a Moor
: a North African. It is difficult to know in what context Orlando’s actual ancestors would have fought against Moors in North Africa, though his literary ancestor, Charlemagne’s knight, Roland or Orlando, the hero of Ariosto’s epic poem
Orlando Furioso
(1532), had fought against them and been driven mad by love (see the introduction, p. xxv). According to the MS, the novel’s action begins in 1553 when Thomas Sackville, like Orlando, would have been sixteen; the time sequence quickly moves on to the end of Elizabeth’s reign (which began in 1558).
2.
fields of asphodel
: where the immortals or the happy dead live. The asphodel is a lily-like flower – Vita had found it growing wild in Persia on her visit in 1926 (
Vita,
p. 157).
3.
northern mists… coronets on their heads
: ‘The Sackvilles are supposed to have gone into Normandy in the ninth century with Rollo the Dane’ (
Knole,
p. 29).
4.
an heraldic leopard
: mentioned as decorating the Tudor gables (
Knole,
pp. 2, 3).
5.
the shapely legs, the handsome body
: what follows, according to Nicolson, is a recognizable description of Vita Sackville-West, even down to the detail that she ‘was a trifle clumsy’ (p. 13). Woolf, like the book’s narrator, wrote admiringly of Vita’s legs (e.g. to Jacques Raverat, 26 December 1924, as ‘her real claim to consideration’,
Letters,
III, p. 150; or in her diary a year later,
Diary,
III, 21 December 1925, p. 52).
6.
Aethelbert: A Tragedy in Five Acts
: like Orlando, Thomas Sackville, first Earl of Dorset, wrote a five-act tragedy inspired by early English history,
Gorboduc,
performed in 1561 (
Knole,
pp. 33, 41).
7.
Stubbs, the gardener
: Stubbs was the name of the head gardener at Knole when Woolf was writing (Nicolson).
8.
the house was a town
: Woolf exaggerates Vita’s descriptions of Knole as ‘a medieval village’, ‘a jumbled village’, just as below (p. 16) where Knole’s four acres become five (
Knole,
pp. 1, 18).
9.
a place crowned by a single oak tree
: Vita often wrote under an oak in Knole park, on a high mound known as the Mast Head (Nicolson). The oak tree, traditionally associated with English kings, later provides the title for Orlando’s major poem, his equivalent of Vita’s prize-winning poem
The Land.
Its title suggests the value of roots, family and Englishness.
10.
Sometimes one could see the English Channel… London… Snowdon
: none of these places can actually be seen from Knole, but this panoramic sweep (echoed in the novel’s time scheme) seems to have been part of her plan for the book from its first conception: ‘Suddenly between twelve & one I conceived a whole fantasy to be called “The Jessamy Brides”… Two women, poor, solitary at the top of a house — one can see anything (for this is all fantasy) the Tower Bridge, clouds, aeroplanes… The Ladies are to have Con stantinople in view. Dreams of golden domes…’ (
Diary,
III, 14 March 1927, p. 131).
11.
Mrs. Stewkley’s sitting-room… hodden brown
: a ‘Mrs Stewkly’ is named as ‘At the parlour table’ in a list of Knole household servants from 1613 (
Knole,
p. 78); hodden is a coarse woollen cloth; the unidentified writer is William Shakespeare, whose portrait was in the Poets’ Parlour at Knole. Vita later wrote, ‘I often entertained wild dreams that some light might be thrown on the Shakespeare problem by a discovery of letters or documents at Knole’ (
Knole,
4th edn, 1958, p. 57).
Woolf had associated Shakespeare at work with the mystery of creativity in her short story ‘The Mark on the Wall’: ‘A man who sat himself solidly in an arm-chair, and looked into the fire, so – A shower of ideas fell perpetually from some very high Heaven down through his mind. He leant his forehead on his hand, and people, looking in through the open door…’ (
Shorter Fiction,
p. 85.)
12.
the great Queen herself
: Queen Elizabeth gave Knole to Thomas Sackville in 1566, and visited the house on a royal progress in 1573. There was a portrait of her in the Brown Gallery (
Phillips,
I, p. 190; II, p. 423). Woolf’s portrayal of Queen Elizabeth was partly in spired by her waxwork effigy, then at Westminster Abbey, of which she wrote a description soon after completing
Orlando
: ‘Her
eyes are wide and vigilant; her nose thin as the beak of a hawk; her lips shut tight; her eyebrows arched; only the jowl gives the finedrawn face its massiveness’ (
New Republic,
11 April 1928; reprinted in ‘The Fleeting Portrait’,
CE,
IV, p. 205). Woolf’s friend Lytton Strachey drew a comparable portrait of the ageing queen in his
Elizabeth and Essex
(published December 1928), but Woolf did not apparently read it until after the publication of
Orlando
in October (see
Diary,
III, 25 November 1928, p. 208).
13.
she heard the guns in the Channel
: Vita had told Virginia of hearing the guns in France from Knole during the First World War (Nicolson). Woolf had herself heard them on the downs at Asheham in 1916 (see ‘Heard on the Downs’,
Essays,
II, pp. 40–42).
14.
the great monastic house
: Knole had passed from Archbishop Bourchier and Cardinal Morton to Henry VIII, and thence to Queen Elizabeth who gave it to Thomas Sackville. Although the unnamed house in
Orlando
is said to have been given to Orlando’s father, Orlando himself is also identified with Thomas Sackville, both as a poet and playwright (Sackville had written
Gorboduc
and the moralistic poem
A Mirror for Magistrates),
as the Queen’s ‘young cousin’, and in receiving various honours from her. Like Sackville, Orlando be comes Lord Treasurer and Lord High Steward, is dubbed Knight of the Garter (see p. 18), and is sent to Scotland ‘on a sad embassy to the unhappy Queen’ (p. 18), i.e. to warn Mary Queen of Scots of her impending execution (
Knole,
pp. 34–5).
15.
booming at the Tower
: i.e. at the Tower of London, to celebrate the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588.
16.
Richmond
: Queen Eli2abeth lived at Richmond Palace, to the south-west of London, dying there in 1603. She was succeeded by James I.
17.
Doris, Chloris, Delia, or Diana
: these might be typical names of mistresses in love poems: the Elizabethan poet Samuel Daniel wrote a sonnet sequence to Delia; while the Restoration poet Charles Sackville, sixth Earl (1638–1706), ‘left us gay and artificial stanzas to Chloris and Dorinda’ (
Knole,
p. 115).
18.
Wapping Old Stairs
: in east London, near the Tower and running down to the docks. Woolf’s fascination with Elizabethan voyages is evident in what follows: the Spanish main was the north-east coast of South America, from Panama to the Orinoco River; the Azores are islands off the coast of Portugal, where in 1591, the
explorer Sir Richard Grenville’s ship
Revenge
was sunk as he fought against the Spanish. (Her essay on Hakluyt’s Voyages, ‘Trafficks and Discoveries’, is reprinted in
Essays,
II, pp. 329–36.)
19.
Earl of Cumberland
: ‘a picturesque figure. He was Elizabeth’s official champion at all jousts and tilting, a nobleman of great splendour… [he had] the love of adventure which carried him eleven times to sea, to the Indies and elsewhere’ (
Knole,
pp. 48–9). He was the father-in-law of Richard Sackville, third Earl of Dorset, and there was a portrait of him in the Brown Gallery (
Phillips,
p. 423). The reference to Cumberland building almshouses in the Sheen Road later in this paragraph looks like a private joke. On 27 August 1932, Woolf dictated the following response to an inquiry on this topic:
[Mrs Woolf] cannot recollect that she had any authority for saying that Lord Cumberland founded almshouses; she thinks it probable that having some recollection of old almshouses in that neighbourhood, she fathered them upon Lord Cumberland on the spur of the moment.
These early nineteenth century almshouses stood just around the corner from Hogarth House, Richmond, where the Woolfs lived from 1915–24. There is a further reference to them near the end of the novel (p. 208).
20.
Clorinda, Favilla, Euphrosyne
: Nigel Nicolson identifies Clorinda with Rosamund Grosvenor, Vita’s first, and at one time best-loved, friend (
Vita,
pp. 23–4, 48). Euphrosyne (‘joy’) was one of the three classical Graces (Woolf had used the name for the boat in her first novel,
The Voyage Out,
1915). As ‘one of the Irish Desmonds’, she may recall the portrait in the Leicester Gallery of Catherine Fitzger ald, Countess of Desmond (
Knole,
p. 14).
21.
The Great Frost
: occurred in January 1608. Woolf knew of it from Thomas Dekker’s pamphlet ‘The Great Frost/Cold Doings in London, except it be at the Lottery’, reprinted anonymously in Edward Arber’s
An English Garner
(I, 1877, pp. 77–99). Some details are taken from his pamphlet, e.g. ‘the high mortality among sheep and cattle’, but Woolfs account is more fantastic, so that the rocks of the Peak District (‘some parts of Derbyshire’) are attributed to ‘a kind of petrification’. Dekker described how the Thames became ‘a very pavement of glass’, and the citizens played games and sold
food and drink on the frozen river; he also described the plight of a man trapped on an ice floe as the result of the sudden thaw with which the frost ended. Woolf had a letter from Vita of 31 January 1927 describing Moscow and ‘all the traffic passing to and fro across the frozen river as though it were a road; and sleighs every where…’(
Letters of Vita,
p. 183.)
22.
the north-west passage…Armada
: Elizabethan explorers had hoped to find a sea route to the Far East by sailing around the north coast of America. The Spanish Armada was the fleet sent by Philip II against Elizabeth in 1588 (see Note 15, above).
23.
London Bridge
: built at the narrowest point of the river, the old bridge carried shops and houses on it, and the ice would have been deepest here. The Surrey side is the south side of the river.
24.
corantoe and lavolta
: Renaissance dances, the first characterized by quick running steps (‘courante’), the second a dance for a couple, involving high leaps.
25.
Princess Marousha Romanovitch
: later referred to as Sasha, this charac ter may partly have been suggested by ‘La Muscovite’, whose pastel portrait hangs in the sitting-room at Knole and who is addressed in Charles Sackville’s poem ‘Arno’s Vale’ (
Knole,
p. 173); but Woolf’s main inspiration was Vita’s great love, Violet Trefusis. On 13 October 1927 Virginia wrote to Vita: ‘Tomorrow I begin the chapter which describes Violet and you meeting on the ice… Do give me some inkling what sort of quarrels you had. Also, for what particular quality did she first choose you?’ The same letter links Vita (rather than Violet) with emeralds, however: ‘I want to see you in the lamplight, in your emeralds’ (
Letters,
III, p. 430).