Orlando (7 page)
Authors: Virginia Woolf
I am writing Orlando half in a mock style very clear & plain, so that people will understand every word. But the balance between truth & fantasy must be careful. It is based on Vita, Violet Trefusis, Lord Lascelles, Knole &c.
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In support of this claim the first edition features eight illustrations, plus a black and white portrait on the dust jacket which appears as the frontispiece to this edition. The photograph is of a painting or part of a painting of a gentleman in Elizabethan costume with a large shield before him (on previous occasions Vanessa Bell had designed and illustrated dust jackets for Woolf’s novels). The first edition notes that this portrait (which looks like a modern pastiche) is reproduced by kind permission of the Worthing Art Gallery, but nothing more is known about it.
Woolf began assembling the photographs for
Orlando
in October 1927; three of these were of Vita Sackville-West, while three others were taken from portraits at Knole. Taking the pictures in order of their appearance, the first, which is also the frontispiece to the original volume (‘Orlando as a Boy’), is the right-hand side of a double portrait at Knole. Painted by Cornelius Nuie, it shows two sons of Edward Sackville, fourth Earl of Dorset, as boys; the younger one, the Honourable Edward Sackville, is depicted here. Vita had also reproduced this picture in her book
Knole and the Sackvilles
(1922). The second (‘The Russian Princess as a Child’) is a photograph of Woolf’s niece Angelica Bell (daughter of Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant); it may be a collage, as the lower part of the photograph appears painted. The third (‘The Archduchess Harriet’) is Marcus Gheeraerts’ portrait of Mary Curzon, fourth Countess of Dorset, then hanging in the
parlour passage at Knole; while the fourth (‘Orlando as Ambassador’), is from a pastel portrait of Lionel, first Duke of Dorset, by Rosalba Carriera, in the sitting room.
2
The fifth (‘Orlando on her return to England’) is a studio photograph of Vita, probably taken by Lenare. The sixth (‘Orlando about the year 1840’) seems to have been taken by Vanessa and Duncan on the afternoon of 14 November 1927.
3
The seventh (‘Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine, Esquire’) is the painting of a young man
c.
1820 by an unidentified artist – he bears some resemblance to the young Harold Nicolson. Vita had bought it from a London dealer and it now hangs at Sissinghurst.
4
The eighth (‘Orlando at the present time’) is a photograph of Vita at Long Barn taken by Leonard Woolf, probably at the end of April 1928. Virginia wrote to Vita: ‘It has now become essential to have a photograph of Orlando in country clothes in a wood. If you have films and a camera I thought Leonard might take you.’
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In this edition the photographs have been placed as closely as possible to their positions in the first edition.
1.
Diary,
III, 22 Oct. 1927, p. 162.
2.
The use of these three Knole portraits later led the new Lord Sackville to complain that they had been used without his permission – in fact Vita had obtained her father’s permission before his death; see
Letters,
III, p. 558.
3.
See letters to Vita, 6 and 11 Nov. 1927,
Letters,
III, pp. 434–5. Footnotes explain that three portraits of the Sackville family were used in
Orlando
(the frontispiece and the third and fourth pictures). A further footnote (p. 435) identifies the photograph of Vita in a hat, shawl and check skirt (‘Orlando about the year 1840’) as the work of Vanessa and Duncan. The earlier photograph of Vita in satin and pearls (‘Orlando on her return to England’) was probably taken by Lenare, since Virginia wrote to Vita, ‘Nessa wants to photograph you at 2, that is if she thinks the Lenare too bad.’ It looks as if, in addition to the fancy-dress ‘1840’ picture, Vanessa and
Duncan took some photographs of Vita in the pink satin and pearls that were intended to suggest a Lely portrait because in Madeline Moore’s book
The Short Season Between Two Silences
(Unwin Hyman, 1984) there is a photograph of a rather dishevelled Vita in pearls and satin, captioned, ‘Vita… posing as a lily [Lely?] in Vanessa Bell’s studio, 1928’. In
Vita
(p. 182), Victoria Glendinning quotes an amusing account of one of these photographic sessions, though she later (p. 205) identifies the ‘1840’ portrait as the one taken by Lenare, a view contradicted by the editors of the
Letters.
4.
See Letter to Vita, 17 April 1928,
Letters,
III, p. 484; and footnote.
5.
Letter to Vita, 27 April 1928,
Letters,
III, p. 488. This photograph also appears in
Letters of Vita.
Two other versions, apparently taken on the same occasion, appear in
Vita
(here credited to Virginia, rather than Leonard) and in Nigel Nicolson’s
Vita and Harold: The Letters of Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson 1910–1962
(Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1992).
Overleaf: facsimile of the frontispiece and title page of the first edition.
ORLANDO
A BIOGRAPHY
VIRGINIA WOOLF
Published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf at the Hogarth Press, 52 Tavistock Square, London, W.C. 1928
TO
V. SACKVILLE-WEST
Many friends have helped me in writing this book. Some are dead and so illustrious that I scarcely dare name them, yet no one can read or write without being perpetually in the debt of Defoe, Sir Thomas Browne, Sterne, Sir Walter Scott, Lord Macaulay, Emily Brontë, De Quincey, and Walter Pater – to name the first that come to mind. Others are alive, and though perhaps as illustrious in their own way, are less formidable for that very reason. I am specially indebted to Mr. C. P. Sanger, without whose knowledge of the law of real property this book could never have been written. Mr. Sydney-Turner’s wide and peculiar erudition has saved me, I hope, some lamentable blunders. I have had the advantage – how great I alone can estimate – of Mr. Arthur Waley’s knowledge of Chinese. Madame Lopokova (Mrs. J. M. Keynes) has been at hand to correct my Russian. To the unrivalled sympathy and imagination of Mr. Roger Fry I owe whatever understanding of the art of painting I may possess. I have, I hope, profited in another department by the singularly penetrating, if severe, criticism of my nephew Mr. Julian Bell. Miss M. K. Snowdon’s indefatigable researches in the archives of Harrogate and Cheltenham were none the less arduous for being vain. Other friends have helped me in ways too various to specify. I must content myself with naming Mr. Angus Davidson; Mrs. Cartwright; Miss Janet Case; Lord Berners (whose knowledge of Elizabethan music has proved invaluable); Mr. Francis Birrell; my brother, Dr. Adrian Stephen; Mr. F. L. Lucas; Mr. and Mrs. Desmond MacCarthy; that most inspiriting of critics, my brother-in-law, Mr. Clive Bell; Mr. G. H. Rylands; Lady Colefax; Miss Nellie Boxall; Mr. J. M. Keynes; Mr. Hugh Walpole; Miss Violet Dickinson; the Hon. Edward Sackville West; Mr. and Mrs. St. John Hutchinson; Mr. Duncan Grant; Mr. and Mrs. Stephen Tomlin; Mr. and Lady Ottoline
Morrell; my mother-in-law, Mrs. Sidney Woolf; Mr. Osbert Sitwell; Madame Jacques Raverat; Colonel Cory Bell; Miss Valerie Taylor; Mr. J. T. Sheppard; Mr. and Mrs. T. S. Eliot; Miss Ethel Sands; Miss Nan Hudson; my nephew Mr. Quentin Bell (an old and valued collaborator in fiction); Mr. Raymond Mortimer; Lady Gerald Wellesley; Mr. Lytton Strachey; the Viscountess Cecil; Miss Hope Mirrlees; Mr. E. M. Forster; the Hon. Harold Nicolson; and my sister, Vanessa Bell – but the list threatens to grow too long and is already far too distinguished. For while it rouses in me memories of the pleasantest kind it will inevitably wake expectations in the reader which the book itself can only disappoint. Therefore I will conclude by thanking the officials of the British Museum and Record Office for their wonted courtesy; my niece Miss Angelica Bell, for a service which none but she could have rendered; and my husband for the patience with which he has invariably helped my researches and for the profound historical knowledge to which these pages owe whatever degree of accuracy they may attain. Finally, I would thank, had I not lost his name and address, a gentleman in America, who has generously and gratuitously corrected the punctuation, the botany, the entomology, the geography, and the chronology of previous works of mine and will, I hope, not spare his services on the present occasion.
A Note on the Illustrations
xlvii
1. Orlando as a Boy
Frontispiece
2. The Russian Princess as a Child 35
5. Orlando on her return to England 111
6. Orlando about the year 1840 171
7. Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine, Esquire 185
8. Orlando at the present time 221
He – for there could be no doubt of his sex, though the fashion of the time did something to disguise it – was in the act of slicing at the head of a Moor
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which swung from the rafters. It was the colour of an old football, and more or less the shape of one, save for the sunken cheeks and a strand or two of coarse, dry hair, like the hair on a cocoanut. Orlando’s father, or perhaps his grandfather, had struck it from the shoulders of a vast Pagan who had started up under the moon in the barbarian fields of Africa; and now it swung, gently, perpetually, in the breeze which never ceased blowing through the attic rooms of the gigantic house of the lord who had slain him.
Orlando’s fathers had ridden in fields of asphodel,
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and stony fields, and fields watered by strange rivers, and they had struck many heads of many colours off many shoulders, and brought them back to hang from the rafters. So too would Orlando, he vowed. But since he was sixteen only, and too young to ride with them in Africa or France, he would steal away from his mother and the peacocks in the garden and go to his attic room and there lunge and plunge and slice the air with his blade. Sometimes he cut the cord so that the skull bumped on the floor and he had to string it up again, fastening it with some chivalry almost out of reach so that his enemy grinned at him through shrunk, black lips triumphantly. The skull swung to and fro, for the house, at the top of which he lived, was so vast that there seemed trapped in it the wind itself, blowing this way, blowing that way, winter and summer. The green arras with the hunters on it moved perpetually. His fathers had been noble since they had been at all. They came out of the northern mists wearing coronets on their heads.
3
Were not the bars of darkness in the room, and the yellow pools which chequered the floor, made by the sun falling through the stained glass of a vast coat of arms in
the window? Orlando stood now in the midst of the yellow body of an heraldic leopard.
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When he put his hand on the window-sill to push the window open, it was instantly coloured red, blue, and yellow like a butterfly’s wing. Thus, those who like symbols, and have a turn for the deciphering of them, might observe that though the shapely legs, the handsome body,
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and the well-set shoulders were all of them decorated with various tints of heraldic light, Orlando’s face, as he threw the window open, was lit solely by the sun itself. A more candid, sullen face it would be impossible to find. Happy the mother who bears, happier still the biographer who records the life of such a one! Never need she vex herself, nor he invoke the help of novelist or poet. From deed to deed, from glory to glory, from office to office he must go, his scribe following after, till they reach whatever seat it may be that is the height of their desire. Orlando, to look at, was cut out precisely for some such career. The red of the cheeks was covered with peach down; the down on the lips was only a little thicker than the down on the cheeks. The lips themselves were short and slightly drawn back over teeth of an exquisite and almond whiteness. Nothing disturbed the arrowy nose in its short, tense flight; the hair was dark, the ears small, and fitted closely to the head. But, alas, that these catalogues of youthful beauty cannot end without mentioning forehead and eyes. Alas, that people are seldom born devoid of all three; for directly we glance at Orlando standing by the window, we must admit that he had eyes like drenched violets, so large that the water seemed to have brimmed in them and widened them; and a brow like the swelling of a marble dome pressed between the two blank medallions which were his temples. Directly we glance at eyes and forehead, thus do we rhapsodise. Directly we glance at eyes and forehead, we have to admit a thousand disagreeables which it is the aim of every good biographer to ignore. Sights disturbed him, like that of his mother, a very beautiful lady in green walking out to feed the peacocks with Twitchett, her maid, behind her; sights exalted him – the birds and the trees; and made him in love with death – the evening sky, the homing
rooks; and so, mounting up the spiral stairway into his brain – which was a roomy one – all these sights, and the garden sounds too, the hammer beating, the wood chopping, began that riot and confusion of the passions and emotions which every good biographer detests. But to continue – Orlando slowly drew in his head, sat down at the table, and, with the half-conscious air of one doing what they do every day of their lives at this hour, took out a writing book labelled ‘Aethelbert: A Tragedy in Five Acts’,
6
and dipped an old stained goose quill in the ink.