Woolf 1928 Orlando Moore 1979

Orlando: An Edition of the ManuscriptAuthor(s): Madeline MooreSource: Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 25, No. 3/4, Virginia Woolf Issue (Autumn -Winter, 1979), pp. 303-355Published by: Hofstra UniversityStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/441325 .Accessed: 11/05/2011 11:10

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Orlando:

An Edition of the Manuscript

Edited with an Introduction and Commentary by MADELINE MOORE

Introduction

Victoria Sackville-West became the one grand passion of Virginia Woolfs life. But politically, as well as personally, Woolfs response to Vita's wealth was complex and often contradictory. Her first reaction to Knole House (Vita's ancestral home and the setting for most of Or- lando), bears this out:

As a setting & preparation I always feel this, or Ottoline's, or any aristocrat's that I know, to be perfection. But one waits, and nothing happens. ... its [sic] the breeding of Vita's that I took away with me as an impression, carrying her & Knole in my eye as I travelled up with the lower middle classes, through slums. There is Knole, capable of housing all the desperate poor of Judd Street, & with only that one solitary earl in the kernel.1

Nonetheless, three years later in a letter dated October 9, 1927, she would write Vita saying, "Your excellence as a subject arises largely from your noble birth. (But whats 400 years of nobility, all the same?) and the opportunity thus given for florid descriptive passages in great abundance. Also, I admit, I should like to untwine and twist again some very odd, incongruous strands in you ... it sprung upon me how I could revolutionise biography in a night."2 Shortly after she began writing Orlando, Woolf published "The New Biography" where she

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TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE

claims that the modern biographer has altered his point of view so that he has "ceased to be the chronicler" and has become "an artist," making himself "as much the subject of his own irony and observation" as his subjects are.3

Woolf's interest in biography was only a part of the larger aesthetic question which preoccupied her before and during the composition of Orlando: the question of how the dichotomy between fact and fancy affects not only biography, but the novel and poetry, and how that dichotomy might be overcome.

In "The Narrow Bridge of Art," she predicts that in the future, the fact-recording power of fiction will decline. Fiction "will resemble poetry [because] ... it will give the relation of the mind to general ideas and its soliloquy in solitude."4 Of the novelists she mentions, only Laurence Sterne, in Tristram Shandy, reveals this power. And, in "Phases of Fiction", the long article written simultaneously with Orlando, Woolf recognizes that Sterne, like the modern biographer, is as fascinated by the "fancies and sensibilities" of his own mind as he is of Uncle Thoby's character. "In no other book are the writer and reader so involved together."5

Like Sterne, Woolf sought to explode the fact-bound nature of fiction by externalizing the self-consciousness of the author or "biographer" herself. In Vita Sackville-West, she discovered a modern pro- totype whose complexity called for the self-conscious fantasies which permeate Orlando. But Vita's portrait is fantastic not only because the hero-heroine changes sex and defies time to gain autonomy; it is fantastic because Woolf externalizes the arbitrary nature of creation itself, as she satirizes her own powers of observation and the audacious notion that a life may be ultimately defined. Essentially, she wove an everlasting garland round her fickle lover in the reciprocal form of the novel itself. She eternalized her role as the pursuer, and Vita's role as the pursued through the machinations of the outwitted "biographer" seeking constantly to unite the many selves of her elusive subject.

For although Defoe is the aesthetic father of a narrative to be called "The Jessamy Brides" about "two women, poor, solitary, at the top of a house" (AWD, 104), Sterne's influence prevailed as the novel evolved to "a grand historical picture, the outlines of all my friends" (AWD, September 18, 1927) and finally became a mock "biography beginning in the year 1500 and continuing to the present day, called Orlando: Vita; only with a change about from one sex to another" (AWD, October 5, 1927).

* * * * * * * * * * * *

304

VIRGINIA WOOLF'S ORLANDO

On December 6, 1928, Virginia Woolf presented Victoria Sackville-West with the leather bound single volume manuscript of Orlando, which she began on October 8, 1927, and completed on March 17, 1928. It is now on permanent display in the Great Hall at Knole House. The manuscript is unpaginated, but when counted, the pages total two hundred and eighty six. Although very similar to the published version, there are some significant differences. The most obvious are structural; the manuscript is divided into four chapters, each one corresponding to a literary and historical period: Chapter One- Elizabethan and Jacobean, Chapter Two-Carolinian; Chapter Three-Restoration and Augustan; and Chapter Four-Victorian and Modern. Within each of the manuscript chapters, Woolf numbers subdivisions which signal the reader to shifts in time or scene. In the text, these numbered subdivisions have been eliminated, perhaps because they were unnecessarily formal, and there are six chapters rather than four. The first two chapters of the manuscript correspond exactly to the first two chapters of the text. But the third chapter of the manuscript includes Chapter IV of the novel. In dividing the chapters so as to place Orlando's change of sex at the end of Chapter III in the novel, Woolf gives that event the prominence it deserves. Also Chapter Four of the manuscript, which corresponds to Chapters V and VI of the novel, was divided in order to emphasize Orlando's marriage to Shel- merdine in the nineteenth century, leading to her fulfillment as a poet and a woman in the twentieth century.

To visualize these structural changes, it would be necessary to transcribe the entire manuscript, and set it beside the completed text. Since space does not allow this, I have noted Woolf's dating of the manuscript chapters by transcribing her marginalia, or indicating the dates in the footnotes. October 8, 1927, is the date she began writing, and it initiates Chapter One. October 24, 1927, is designated as Section IV, Chapter One. On October 29, 1927, she began Chapter Two. Chapter Three is dated November 10, 1927, with Section III of that chapter dated November 29, 1927, and Chapter Three, Section IV, dated December 8, 1927. Chapter Four is dated February 1, 1928. She completed the manuscript on March 17, 1928, and dedicated it to Vita Sackville-West on December 6, 1928.

More substantive differences in the manuscript fall into two major themes: first, the category of writing and Woolf s consciousness of the "biographer" who believes in a false dichotomy between fact and fancy, and the trivial concerns of critics; second, passages which vilify wealth and the injustice and cruelty it engenders. In the first category

305


Woolf's sense of outrage over the act of criticism emerges. Historically, this was the offspring of her difficult composition of "Phases of Fic- tion"; but empirically she identified certain types of criticism with a masculine mode, rife with the overtones of pomposity. More extreme, too, is her anger over the privileges of wealth. For example, in the famous Great Frost scene, she comments "Nobody of very high birth seemed to be included-which seemed to show that the upper sort had received warning and made for safety before those great hammer blows ... which Orlando had heard in his misery had rent the ice asunder."

In editing the manuscript, I have been guided by the following principles and techniques: first, I have included all those passages which are significantly different from corresponding passages in the text by placing them in the right hand margin across from the text positioned in the left hand margin. The text is numbered, but the manuscript is unnumbered, and corresponds to the text. Second, my transcription of the manuscript has been literal and comprehensive. I have followed Woolfs punctuation, and I have duplicated her inser- tions and deletions, including the long passages she deleted by wavy lines. Third, where she has excised an entire long passage in the text which was important in the manuscript, I have signified this by printing the last published sentence before the long textual deletion, and then transcribing the deletion in the right hand margin. I have also indicated this in a footnote. Fourth, I have pointed out marginalia only where it clarifies the meaning of the manuscript or identifies a date. When Woolf dates her manuscript in the margin, but does not follow it by a passage which should be transcribed, I have noted the date in a footnote. Fifth, where it has been important to identify allusions in the text itself, I have quoted the text, but not the manuscript, and have made the identifications in the footnotes.

I have included in the appendices a number of letters that exemplify Vita Sackville-West's and Harold Nicolson's reaction to Or- lando as well as the intimacy that existed between Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West. All the correspondence between Vita and her husband is heretofore unpublished as are the two letters in Appendix C from Vita to Virginia.

Notes

1The Diary of Virginia Woolf, II, 1920-1924, ed. Anne Olivier Bell (New York and London, 1978), 307.

306


2 The Letters of Virginia Woolf, III, 1923-1928, eds. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann (London, 1977), 429.

3 Collected Essays, IV, 231, 233. "The New Biography" was first published in the New York Herald Tribune, October 30, 1927.

4 Collected Essays, II, 225. "The Narrow Bridge of Art" was first published in the New York Herald Tribune on August 14, 1927.

5 Ibid., 92, 93. "Phases of Fiction" was first published in The Bookman, April, May, and June, 1929.

307

Orlando

[HP,5;HBJ,4] To Vita Sackville West

Vita From Virginia

Dec 6th 1928

[HP,3;HBJ,5] Orlando A Biography Virginia Woolf

(Oct 8th 1927)1 Suggestions for short pieces A Biography This is to tell a person's life from the year 15002 to 1928.

Changing its sex.

Taking different aspects of the character in different Centuries: the theory being that character goes on underground before we are born; & [leave] leaves some-

thing afterword also.3 A Poem

Something about an island landscape. dream.4 People with canoes. the trees. Moments of Being Something Comic

[HP,15-16;HBJ,13-14]

Sometimes he cut the cord so that the skull bumped on the floor and he had to string it up again, fastening it with

308


some chivalry almost out of reach so that his enemy grinned at him through shrunk, black lips trium- phantly.5 And then leaping high [into the] air &

holding his sword in both hands he would strike so viciously that [the] a little

bit of the leathery skin would be sliced

through: of such rages the battered head

bore many tokens: [for if Orlando loved he also hated]. (For) If he was moved [now]

by [a] Knightly sentiment which bade him

give the skull (an) advantage [over him] he was [also] (then) tormented with [a] the desire to [give things pain] (hurt): Even ([a]) (this) inanimate thing; [like the Moors skull to he was] (to see it suffer: &

then) He [would be overcome, too, with it and even a] Even [as he struck; with

even] when the skull had done knocking against the [raft] rafters he would be overcome with the vanity of all this

hatred, (&) love. & [would] lean his head in his hand, kneel in a bare pool, & look out of the window. Kneeling in a bare

pool.

[HP,58;HBJ,61]

Some blind instinct, for he was past reasoning, must have driven him to take the river bank in the direction of the sea.6

[HP,60;HBJ,63]

Among other strange sights was to be seen a cat suckling

309


its young; a table laid sumptuously for a supper of twenty; a couple in bed; together with an extraordinary number of cooking utensils.7 X Many of these icebergs were simply

melting & disappeared beneath Orlandos

eyes; others were [foam] struck by float-

ing logs & foundered; while some (but there were very few [thrust] drifted to the bank & let their prisoners, with what

feelings of thankfulness can be imagined, escape onto the [bank] safely. X Nobody of very high birth seemed to be included

(save one old nobleman, in fur & slippers, who seemed to judge by his gestures in a

towering rage, & went under not far from where Orlando stood calling down ven-

geance upon (such) plotters as if the thaw had been the work of these rebels)

[w] which seemed to show that the upper sort had received warning & made for

safety before those great hammer blows

[of the] which Orlando had heard in his

misery had rent the ice asunder. The loss of life must have been enormous. X

[HP,62;HBJ,65] CHAPTER II

The biographer is now faced with a difficulty which it is better perhaps to confess than to gloss over.8

[HP,65;HBJ,69]

Then the light would be lost altogether, and Mrs.

310


Grimsditch, the house- keeper, would say to Mr.

Dupper, the chaplain, how she hoped his Lordship had not met with some bad acci- dent.9

[HP,67;HBJ,70]

Even this was not enough for him, but he must descend into the crypt where his ancestors lay, coffin piled upon coffin, for ten generations together.

[HP,85; HBJ,91]

All this Greene told with a spirit that roused Orlando to the highest pitch of delight. He had a power of mimicry that brought the dead to life, and could say the finest things of books provided they were written three hundred years ago.12

Even this was not enough for him; but he must descend into the crypt10 beneath

where, [in] his ancestors lay, one after another: ancestors & [his] death & cor-

ruption & how [the] life is founded upon a tomb, he sobbed & [sobbed] for the

sight of a woman in Russian trousers'1: with little eyes, rather slanty: & some

greenish fur about her neck. But he was

never to see her again. And so he [who] found his way back to his own

[apartment] suite of rooms; & Mrs. Grimsditch [who] put the tankard from her lips, & said that she [to] thanked God his Lordship was safe in his room again: for she had [made sure] he was foully murdered.

*(Unfortunately we cannot repeat these

sayings, larded as they were with much of an impure nature; & for the same reason we are obliged to)*

311


It is extremely unfortunate that we are unable to repeat (any of) these (impure) [criticisms], or to set down [any of these]; anecdotes about the Great Elizabethans

(with wh. Orlando was to delight) [which]. When it came to tearing up &

dropping into the fire [the true story, as we believe it to be,] of [Mr. W. H.: to-

gether with] Shakespeares own account of his relations with that (Mr. W.) gentleman & the dark lady [which he had

told] ([he wrote]) (written by him) with

great fullness & spirit in a letter [which] to Greene (wh. Greene) happened to have on him & gave to Orlando as a pleasant curiosity & keepsake-When it came to

seeing Shakespeares (own) manuscript ravish in the flames, some compunction (entirely) overcame us. But there was much in those pages of an impure nature; [& modesty in our time is rare enough; to & there would what in conveying them to the flames, we there can be no real conflict in an English heart heart between tr.] when Truth & modesty conflict, who can doubt [that] which should prevail? *(No

Modesty in our age is not so secure as to suffer us to take liberties:* [And] run any risks: & [That we took the only way, all

readers] (No one) [of] British blood will censure us for the course we took: & as for the rest, their opinions [scarcely] in a matter of this sort, scarcely matter.

312


[HP,91;HBJ,97-98]

He saw the beech trees turn golden and the young ferns unfurl; he saw the moon sickle and then circular; he saw-but probably the reader can imagine the passage which should follow and how every tree and plant in the neighbourhood is described first green, then golden; how moons rise and suns set; how spring follows winter and autumn summer; how night succeeds day and day night; how there is first a storm and then fine wea- ther; how things remain much as they are for two or three hundred years or so, except for a little dust and a few cobwebs which one old woman can sweep up in half an hour; a conclusion which, one cannot help feeling, might have been reached more quickly by the simple statement that "Time passed" (here the exact amount could be indicated in brackets) and nothing whatever happened.13 That passage therefore [is omitted;] can

safely be [left to the reader's imagination & knowledge of natural history] But

omitted-would [the n] that the next could

be omitted, & the one after that. For so we should reach our goal before bedtime. But [the] the [truth is] biographer, unlike

the novelist, cannot (loll in a sofa) sit

313


down & (let his)-let his fancy [run run

amok]sport among [ferns moors] storms & dahlias. He must keep strictly to fact, (-he cannot allow them to escape-) & the reader of biography. Both together must puzzle out what actually did take

place on a given occasion: [&] however dull or trivial it may seem, -as "He blew his nose" & "She had an lunch, by her mother's side, who kept a fishmonger shop at 97 Poulty, Cornhill." So now it behooves us to say [that though a great deal did happen to Orlando, though] what

happened to Orlando [during] when he sat beneath the oak tree, leaving the reader entirely free to fill in the poetical phrases for himself.

"I am, said Orlando, flinging himself

down, that first morning after [Greene] he had read Greene's pamphlet & [the] spent the night burning his manuscripts, the most desolate wretch in creation [What is] He went on to think [; & instead of

allowing] about several matters which since the exact transcript of thought is tedious in the extreme we will tabulate(& arrange them) uhder different headings; promising that Orlando only is responsible for the opinions expressed.

A. Love.'4

This is of all human emotions the most wasteful & beastly. [Orlando is alone re-

sponsible for all] How it comes to pass that a state which forbids theft, murder, [&] yet allows its young of both [sexes to]

314


to indulge in a passion which is far more cruel & disastrous I cannot imagine.

B. Friendship The chief use of friendship is to inflict

pain. Our friends are so many lashes on the [great] tawse [with] (by) which we are

[daily lacerated]. [All human] intercourse [is painful] in the [of extreme] with other human beings, is one long flagellation. :society a whip with many thongs.

C. [Books] . Reading [On the whole] better (left) [unread. not

taught] . Why read. D. Writing

[It has been difficult to tabulate this

thought; [for it] on this subject; for

[HP,pp.1 17-1 18;HBJ, 127-128]

".... By the Ambassador's orders the long windows, which are so imposing a feature of Eastern architecture, for though ignorant in many ways ... were thrown wide; and within, we could see a tableau vivant or theatrical display in which English ladies and gentlemen ... represented a masque the work of one. . . . The words were inaudible, but the sight of so many of our country- men and women, dressed with the highest elegance and distinction ... moved me to emotions of which I am certainly not ashamed,

By the Ambassadors order the long windows [had] which [ ...] are so imposing a feature of Eastern architecture, for though ignorant in many ways.. . were thrown

wide; & [in] within the [magnificent pale room] we could see a tableau vivant of theatrical display in which [all the] En-

glish ladies & gentlemen of the highest rank [were took part in] represented the

masque of Comus by our (renowned) En-

glish poet .. . Milton.'5 The words were inaudible but the sight of so many of our

Country men & women in [their] [moved] (stirred) in [the] me emotions which refer

[to] expression (to wh. I can fix no ade-

quate) ... filled my breast. ... *(I can

wager that the natives had never seen

anything like it)* For there were to be

315


though unable. ... I was in- tent upon observing the astonishing conduct of Lady which was of a nature to fasten the eyes of all upon her, and to bring discredit upon her sex and country, when"-unfortunately a branch of the Judas tree broke, Lieutenant Brigge fell to the ground, and the rest of the entry records only his gratitude to Providence (who plays a very large part in the diary) and the exact nature of his injuries.

[HP,146;HBJ,160]

Stretching her arms out (arms, she had learnt already, have no such fatal effects as legs), she thanked Heaven that she was not

prancing down Whitehall on a war-horse, nor even sentencing a man to death. "Better is it", she thought, "to be clothed with poverty and ignorance, which are the dark garments of the female sex; better to leave the rule and discipline of the world to others; better be quit of material ambition, the love of power, and all the other manly desires if so one can more fully enjoy the most exalted raptures known to the human spirit, which are," she said aloud, as her habit

seen the fairest in the land, the bearers of some of [our] (the) greatest names in En-

gland, such as Howard, Stanley, Herbert, Sackville, Talbot. ..6 Here unfortunately a branch of the Judas tree broke, & Lt.

Brigge fell to the ground; [escaping] & in

[describing his] bit of the entry records

only his gratitude to Providence, [for had he not] & the exact nature of injuries.

Heaven be praised she said; [feeling in]

thanking heaven that she did not prance down Pall Mall on a war horse, sentence to death or wear 72 different medals on

her breast: surely our choice is better

than theirs: poverty, insignificance, nakedness: [those are] the [humble] garments which cover us with invisibility &

allow us to escape from all the [ties of

pomp] & circumstance : to pass lonely & free as clouds where we are unnoted; to

hover there (they passed a valley) unre-

garded, [peeking], watching; observing, lost in contemplation; to [escape from] the [0] odious ceremonies, disciplines (here they come to slip from mankind

(who are as busy with their ceremonies &

disciplines; & thus enjoy the most exalted of all states of mind. Where they, with this wealth & [their comfort], & their im-

316


was when deeply moved, "contemplation, solitude, love."17

[HP,155;HBJ,169-170]

After that, Mr. Dupper began to read from a parchment, but the dogs barking, the huntsmen winding their horns, and the stags, who had come into the courtyard in the confusion, baying the moon, not much progress was made, and the company dispersed within after crowding about their Mistress, and testifying in every way to their great joy at her return.

No one showed an instant's suspicion that Orlando was not the Orlando they had known.

[HP,156-157;HBJ,172]

It was a little book bound in velvet, stitched with gold, which had been held by Mary Queen of Scots on the scaffold, and the eye of faith could detect a brownish stain, said to be made of a drop of the Royal blood.18

portance must still be playing at soldiers in Pall Mall.

Mr. Dupper the Chaplain began to read from a parchment: but could not continue. The huntsmen wound their horns. Such a hull a loo had not been heard in those courts these many years. [Smoke]. Meanwhile there gleamed a light in

everyone of those innumerable windows.

*(The smoke poured busily & cheerfully into the air, [as if life had never been so] from a thousand chimneys & the thought came to Orlando as she entered the hall, that whether she was alive or dead, man or woman, [here the house lived : the house flourished :] the house was immortal. lived on. A little damp [as usual? she said] to Mrs. Grimsditch, rubbing [a] the [wall] oak panel as she passed. But from the first moment, when Canute had led the way, [spring] springing upon her, with all his weight which was now con-

siderable, nobody expressed the least doubt of her being)* No one showed an instant's doubt that Orlando was the Or- lando they had known;

317


[HP,161;HBJ,177]

Next morning, in pursuance of these thoughts, she had out her pen and paper, and started afresh upon "The Oak Tree", for to have ink and paper in plenty when one has made do with ber- ries and margins is a delight not to be conceived. Thus she was now striking out a phrase in the depths of despair, now in the heights of ecstasy writing one in, when a shadow darkened the page. She hastily hid her manuscript.

[HP, 167;HBJ,184]

That silence is more profound after noise still wants the confirmation of science. But that loneliness is more apparent directly after one has been made love to, many women would take their oath.

[HP,169;HBJ,186]

Within an hour of the Arch- duke's departure, off she drove.20

Next morning she had out her manuscript & set herself rewriting to continue it. Since she had been a boy she had been at work on it; [& the] for the poem grew almost as slowly as the oak tree it celebrated.19 [Now, in the light of her] To this

tardy & difficult growth perhaps it owed its preservation; for she had spared it [when the rest] (when) the rest of her

works, florid and profuse as they were, had withered under the satire of Nick Greene. Now she began: & [had] was ([nowD in the depths of despair [now]

striking out a phrase, [which seemed to her & was in] then was in this height of

ecstacy, writing one in, when a shadow darkened the page.

That silence is more profound after noise there is no scientific proof. *(But that the

[presence] ([absence]) (excitement) of a lover [Stirs in the breast of a woman some reverberations which] is more sensibly felt when he is not there than when he is, some ladies hold for certain)*

V

Among the possessions of her family which there has [been] so far/no occasion to mention was a [fine] town house, situated in Blackfriars with gardens (running) [reaching] down to the river [H] [bank]. This had been the scene of much

318


festivity [in] in the (time) days of the old

Lord, Orlando's father; who had been a wit in his way, & fond of sporting : but that was in the early part of Elizabeths

reign. Fashion had deserted (the Black- friars end) that part of the town by now moreover. Orlando's long absence had let the roof decay : & [the] much of the furniture had been removed to her coun-

try home, when she took it into her head to furnish it. [The house, then, was boasted only one long room that was

tolerably habitable]2' It was thus to no

fine mansion replete with the comforts & conveniences [which were beginning to] of Queen Anne's this reign that she now betook herself. [Tw] A sitting room [she] had hung with blue damask much moth eaten. There were enough chairs & tables to furnish part of the room conveniently enough [for two] (for one person ?22)

[powdering closets where she could] & wh. was the [room] (which) had the ad-

vantage of an outlook upon the garden & some view of the river (wh. with) [which] to beguile an idle hour. What pleased Orlando as well as anything else [was] however was the number of books which her father & his father, [all] men fond

[with a taste] or (of) letters [which]

though too indolent23 & too noble to

practice the art themselves, had bought both here & abroad. There were the great editions of the Greek & Roman classics; [many] also many of the [Fren] Italian &

319


French romances; Petrarch; [the] Boc-

caccio; Ariosto; so coming to our own

century, [they had] there were the books of Chaucer. (a friend of the first Lord)24 &

Gower; & many [sermons &] translations of the bible & sermons, in block letter; after that the Chronicles; then Spenser's [the fa] Faerie Queen, with the poets autograph; & so on [till] with Montagne & the rest, till Orlando herself having a little pocket money to spend [lay] (laid) it out invariably upon some pamphlet in ballad or play & then acquired the greater part of the dramatic literature of the Elizabethan age. The books, mostly in tooled bindings, had stood the damp well; & made as fit a decoration for a nobleman's apartment as one could wish.

[HP, 193-194;HBJ,213-214]

Added to which (we whisper again lest the women may overhear us), there is a little secret which men share among them; Lord Chester- field whispered it to his son with strict injunctions to sec- recy, "Women are but children of a larger growth. ... A man of sense only trifles with them, plays with them, humours and flatters them", which, since children always hear what they are not meant to, and sometimes, even, grow up, may have somehow leaked out, so that the whole ceremony of

Should she not have been at their feet? And perhaps at their feet she would have been had she not been aware (& as this was in the 18th century when women read less than they do now & it is to the credit of a native shrewdness very notice- able in her) [had she not known] as

plainly as if she had read the letters of Lord Chesterfield & the works of Mr. Ar-

nold Bennett & [Mr. Orlo] Mr. Desmond

McCarthy25 & Mr. Orlo Williams,26 to name (only) the most illustrious of the (of our most) [tribe of] masculinists that

though men say these things to women

they do not mean them. (As) Lord Ches- terfield put the matter in a nutshell. [This, which is common knowledge] But he for-

320


pouring out tea is a curious got that children sometimes see things one. which their elders try to keep hidden (& not seen). He forgot too (that children

grow up. [HP,204;HBJ,227]

Chapter V27 [HP,206-207;HBJ,229]

What light penetrated to the bedrooms where children were born was naturally of an obfusc green, and what light penetrated to the drawing-rooms where grown men and women lived came through curtains of brown and purple plush.28 For it requires no great (gift of) psycho-

logical [acuteness to] to understand that

[damp] when the human body feels the

need of protection, it transfers [this] its need to inanimate [ob] objects [into the

bargain.] The Squire felt the chill creep up his spine, & wrapped himself in a

(dozen) mufflers. (& silences) [At the same time he thought tha.] *(At the same time the nakedness of the table legs, or the fulness of the)* At the same time

[the] all nakedness afflicted him equally :

[beneath] (the light) a bare [well] wall

made him shiver; hence every inch was covered with engravings, & every window was curtained from the light. (But) These outward symptoms had a counter-

part within. *(To cover, to wrap up, to

[warm], to muffle, to conceal, now became the chief pursuit of the educated classes.)*

321


[HP,213-214;HBJ,236-237]

It was time to make an end. Meanwhile she began turning and dipping and reading and skipping and thinking as she read, how very little she had changed all these years. She had been a gloomy boy, in love with death, as boys are; and then she had been amorous and florid; and then she had been sprightly and satirical; and sometimes she had tried prose and sometimes she had tried drama. Yet through all these changes she had remained, she reflected, fundamentally the same. She had the same brooding meditative temper, the same love of animals and nature, the same passion for the country and the seasons.

"After all," she thought, getting up and going to the window,. "nothing has changed. The house, the garden are precisely as they were. Not a chair has been moved, not a trinket sold. There are the same walks, the same lawns, the same trees, and the same pool, which, I dare say, has the same carp in it. True, Queen Victoria is on the throne and not Queen Elizabeth, but what difference..."

(The Land) Begun (it in the reign of

Elizabeth, (had) continued [throughout] the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, (& now) it was time, she thought, to make an end. For though [Horace] & other

great poets have recommended [long periods of] deliberation & [long periods of] [a] long concealment in cellars, till [the wine of poetry] is ripe [& the bottle within & the b] the bottle is cloudy ([without])& the wine ripe [within] mature, they did not consider [the case of an author what will happen if the effect of these long effects of] such [long intervals] how (if the same) [in the case of] if a poem is

[put by &] taken up and put by again &

again the style may change (over a number of years something in the very constitution of the wine may change).29 [She is] not precisely the same person [in the age of Elizabeth as in the reign of Charles the 2nd perhaps She turned to her first page & read] (Orlando) She was the very same person now as she had been in the reign of Queen Elizabeth : but undoubtedly experiencing [love] [some a] such as love & treachery, her

change of sex, her travels, her intercourse with the wits of Queen Anne's day, had

changed her [style]; let alone those other

unpalpable [but] firm -[the] chairs & curtains [&] [drains:] & linen, hot water: so that when she now read a stanza

322


which she had written in the age of Elizabeth & compared it with one written in the time of Charles the second [she] & that with one written in the time of

George the Third, she detected a (great though perhaps superficial) difference. She could remember how, [when she was

a boy her mind seemed] difficult she had found it when she was a boy [to get her

pen round the st stanzas;] how stiff her

pen was; how cumbrous (the) [those

great] And sorrowing I to see the summer

flowers, The lively green, the lovely leas

forlorn, The sturdy trees, so shatter'd with the

showers, The fields so fade that flourish'd so

beforn, It taught me well, all earthly things

be born To die the death, for nought long

time may last; The summer's beauty yields to

winter's blast. She cd. remember the sad stately formal mood in wh- she had [So she had writ-

ten.] The mood was sad, stately a little cumbrous. She She had brisked up later: for here was a little song stuck between the pages:

[Tell me, Dorinda, why so gay] May knaves & fools grow rich &

great,

323


And the world thinks them wise, While I lie dying at her feet

And all the world despise Let conquering kings new triumphs

raise, And melt in court delights:

Her eyes can give much brighter days,

Her arms much softer nights.

But she was dissatisfied [still] still. A thousand doubts & questions had be-

sieged her between Tell me, Dorinda, why so gay,

Why such embroidery, fringe & lace?

Then she [bec] was amorous & tender

And now she was writing, with the [sort

of] reversion to childhood that often comes in maturity, [as if] of the spring again-

[The]

Nightingales sang by day. The

pushing blade

Parted the soil. The

Who/ has not seen the spring, is

blind, is dead.

How swift & sudden strode that

tardy spring, Between a sunrise & a sunset

come!

The shadow of a swallow around the wall;

324


Nightingales sang by day. The

pushing blade

Parted the soil ...

*(lt is the spring again: But not, [she felt], as she compared the lines the same

spring altogether Love & treachery, not

Germane that, Constantinople had [so] somehow got into [the ink pot] her ink

(charged her ?30) She raised her head &

pondered this extraordinary filament which ran back & back stretched back so far (yet) she was the same person; [but the] & the same sights were before her

eyes. She saw the same garden through the same windows from the same chair. The very roses were the same. And yet now she wrote -what she could not have written then.

"I have not understood humanity.31 *[For] with all its glory & incident she still remained a new When she wrote of the

spring she wrote not as she had written as a boy with a sonorous sadness. She tried Now she wished)* [See how eager & she] Life [she felt] She felt that life was shorter; more intense; more personal. The old universal sadness no longer contented her. [Yet] the boat of days, gert round by [sa] the unknown, mast tiller & some more piercing cry. [The mast] [Neither her]

[serio] The seriousness of boyhood [nor] the flippancy of early manhood &

womanhood; [nature] succeeded each

325


other naturally: but neither of them was true to her mood today. And she [began to make] so she beat her fist bit her pen. [It is] she killed- And then the spirit of her

age, which one cannot exorcise, came in. She smiled at the crude fancies of her

boyhood. How she had delighted in vio-

lence & death! How [the formal she] she

had revelled in pits and gulfs & symboli- cal figures like Remorse & Revenge &

Misery!32 (Her pen worked) [It] was swift

[enough] (then) [in those days]; [the

page] [She was incapable] of [presenting

things dramatically]; her Kings & Queens were mere broomsticks; *(but she could

not deny that she had a [very pretty] gift for [description] : [Even] then poetry, nevertheless : a line like)*

Wishing for death, & yet she could not die

-that was not [a] bad [line] for a boy to

have written. There was a plain dignity &

comeliness of speech which too her

fancy. She could be vivid [in a crude

way] too, powerful, picturesque.

Crook back'd he was, tooth shaken, & blear-eyed,

Went on three feet, & sometimes crept on four,

With old lame bones that rattled by his side,-

So she described Age, when she was fif-

teen or sixteen herself. [It was still enough

326


& fantastic enough in all ?,33 with its] [Then, when she let herself] [But] grant- ing that she had no dramatic power [&

was] she could versify the old traditional melancholia & platitudes [which] [with a

sweetness] very tolerably-

The fields so faded that flourish'd so beforn

It taught me well all earthly things be born

to die the death, for nought longe time may last

The summer's beauty yields to winter's blast-

(Odd how incessantly such thoughts rise in the minds of boys & girls as soon as

they can hold the) & [again] she had loved the country then as now, & walked the fields & noticed the

hawthorns, & then looked into the sky & made all the splendid names of the stars

glitter in her verse much as she would have done now. Yes, it was a promising beginning with all its faults. Then, of

course, she remembered, turning the

pages (how) she had [gone about] (grown ashamed of them) & run about the town, [made friends & enemies,] learnt a more

supple style of speech, & struck off amorous songs by the score. For example,

Many knaves & fools grow rich & great,

And the world think them wise, While I lie dying at her feet

And all the world despise.

327


And later still, commerce with the wits had sharpened her tongue, & she had been really rather rude to a certain great lady whom she chose to call Dorinda- But it was astonishing, she thought, [looking through] glancing among the

pages, [which she had] how certain qual- ities and & defects all [the] through. per- sisted [through all changes of time whatever she did, wherever she was:] love of

country, (&) [of] dogs, (&) [of] flowers; [a curious inability to] which coupled with She had never been as adept at human

[society] (life) . Thence her plays were all of them failures : [Gr] Nick Greene had been right about that. *(on the other

hand, her narrative poem, The Oak Tree, at which she had been working [there] off & on all these years (these three cen-

turies) had, she could not but admit, [some old-fashioned] merit of a kind.)* Her fancy was no longer so which gave plainly & seriously the whole history of the tree [& the tree from its] (one) acorn

[day to] to [its] prime, [was a work of sober describing] described with [some account of] the seasons & their changes,34 & [Kings & Queens, & life & death was-

(the lives of) ploughmen & hares & [rab- bits] & the [gr landscape, & changes in the landscape], how field had changed from [ploughed to arable, to how all the] one kind of root to another, & how the river had overflowed its banks once, &

328


the high ground had been under snow, & the plough that had been yellow was now blue- for there had been no important change in agriculture during her life time : all this, with [the reflections to which] such reflections upon death & eternity as come naturally out [of] of doors by day or

by night & she loved the stars especially [which made even the familiar fields romantic -all this] & winter better than summer-all this was [to her liking, she

thought.] w in her own vein, she admit- ted; & [thoug] [Taking up her pen She took up her pen & looked much in though] & much in the style of those boyish verses, [which] (she) she had written (here) in this very room, when Elizabeth was Queen : & the pigeons were calling from the trees then as they were now : the roses were flowering.

I have not understood humanity.

She wrote & put a full stop. But just as she was beginning to think of the things which [for] she did understand-Canute for certain & the [birds & the] monkeys & the kingcubs & the stars-Just as she was dipping her pen in the ink the spirit of the age blew hot upon her cheeks once more. She blushed & the thought of the stars (for she was fonder of night than of day, of winter than spring) led her as it had led the boy to muse upon [the den- sity of mankind] death & eternity-the ancient [bells] bearers, (&) life passing.

329


For nothing had changed, she thought,

looking out of the window, [at the roses &

the grass.] The pigeons were calling from

the trees now [as they did then:] [the] the

[leaves] (roses) were [rustling] (flowering). True Queen Victoria was on

the throne, & not Elizabeth; but what

difference.

[HP,215-216,HBJ,239]

Was it the damp, was it Bartholomew, was it Basket, what was it? she demanded.35 What? she demanded imperiously; but

the room was empty: (&) her [voice]

single voice could not penetrate [the courts of] our University towns where

[such questions are answered;] great men, year in year out, attempt to answer such questions as these-without much

success. Firstly why plain matters of fact

(to one and all) should be turned into

metaphor by [one age]: another : why

[po] poetry should turn to prose; why epics should become lyrics; why grief should become merriment; & satire sym-

pathy; why -[It] There they sit, resolving & debating, debating & resolving, with

copious argument & (express) much dis-

course: with much activity of the pen : [&

many] with the printing presses at their

service : & the young bound to listen to them : & the newspaper (the weasley pimps) taking up & repeating the [tale]

330


tale; [all] all this the professors of literature (debate) year in and year out, & so should have been able to answer Or- lando's question, was it Bartholomew or Basket or what that made her write like this.

*(For our own part (& it is a very humble

one, merely a biographer's part) we will state our opinion [which is that when]

very [briefl] briefly : it was the damp that did it. And as Orlando was by nature dry, the damp afflicted her. It was Basket, Bartholomew, tea, and guilt of Queen Victoria.)* [Of course,] Happily [it is none of our business] to [refer these] [set- tle these disputes] & the question is be-

yond our reach. All [that concerns the

biographer is] truth; & fact; (are our) & in

pursuance of these two mighty Gods we must now [proceed to] [record] [go on with our story] & relate how, Orlando, when the door was shut again, once more took her pen in her right hand & smoothed her paper out with her left. Which she would have found no consolation at all. *(Certainly it is not for us to

attempt to answer questions which such authorities dispute.)*

[HP,226;HBJ,250] It was Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine, Esquire.36

331


[HP,226;HBJ,251]

He had a castle in the Heb- rides, but it was ruined, he told her.37

[HP,230;HBJ,255-256]

Horses were put into car- riages for the sole purpose of being taken out. Empty barouches and landaus were trundled up and down the High Street incessantly. Ad- dresses were read from the Bull. Replies were made from the Stag.38

[HP,261-262; HBJ,290- 291]

Accustomed to the little lit- eratures of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, Orlando was appalled by the consequences of her order. For, of course, to the Victorians themselves Victorian literature meant not merely four great names separate and distinct but four great names sunk and embedded in a mass of Alexander Smiths, Dixons, Blacks, Milmans, Buckles, Taines, Paynes, Tuppers, Jamesons-all vocal, clamor- ous, prominent, and requir- ing as much attention as

Either genius had become much com-

moner, or it had been [proved] (found)

possible to write without it. she reflected. And drawing her chair to the window to

get the benefit of what light could filter

through the angle (& edges) of [walls walls & chimneys She] of the houses (of Mayfair) [which shut her in all round,] she proceeded to [go] go into the question of literature in mid-Victorian En-

gland. To some this conclusion may be summarized [some] in this fashion:

making allowance for the fact that they were constantly interrupted [not] by the need of taking food, [by] & exercizing her

dogs, & answering notes, & receiving calls, & lunching with Lady 0. & teaing with [Sir N.] The duck of M. & dining in

332


anybody else. Orlando's rev- erence for print had a tough job set before it, but drawing her chair to the window to get the benefit of what light might filter between the high houses of Mayfair, she tried to come to a conclusion.

And now it is clear that there are only two ways of coming to a conclusion upon Victo- rian literature-one is to write it out in sixty volumes octavo, the other is to squeeze it into six lines of the length of this one. Of the two courses, economy, since time runs short, leads us to choose the second; and so we proceed. Orlando then came to the conclusion (opening half-a-dozen books) that it was very odd that there was not a single dedication to a nobleman among them; next (turning over a vast pile of memoirs) that several of these writers had family trees half as high as her own; next, that it would be im- politic in the extreme to wrap a ten-pound note round the sugar tongs when Miss Christina Rossetti came to tea; next (here were half- a-dozen invitations to cele- brate centenaries by dining)

every quarter of London,-in spite of all these diversions she found time to con- clude that it was [all a very] a [damned

queer deuc] deuced odd affair.

[To begin with] There were no dedica-

tions; What had happened then to the Patron? Here the footman brought in a note from Miss Christina Rossetti to say that she was sorry to find she had a pre- vious engagement. The [paper] notepaper was excellent; the style plain; the beginning and ending as simple as could be. "Dear Lady Orlando. .... your sincerely Christina Rossetti." [So one didn't] (Couldn't she) slip banknotes beneath

[the] plates anymore? [And they then?] And they didn't hang about in waiting rooms? (Aren't) They had houses, it

seemed, of their own; and they [did] Miss Rossetti made no mention (as they used to do) of her Ladyship's great condescen- sion and goodness, nor hint that [she had a brother, fit for a little] there was a little

place, in the office of the King's [Wine] Chamberlain, worth two hundred a year, which her brother, etc., (as they used to

do). [But what was odder still/ No: "Miss Rossetti seemed [to think she was as had

nothing whatever] to expect [of her]

nothing [& to] whatever, & if she happened to be out next Wednesday, out she was.39 Orlando might call another day. Added to this independence they were

333

(come and hang about in the

waiting room)


that literature since it ate all these dinners must be growing very corpulent; next (she was invited to a score of lectures on the Influence of this upon that; the Classical revival; the Romantic survi- val, and other titles of the same engaging kind) that literature since it listened to all these lectures must be growing very dry; next (here she attended a reception given by a peeress) that literature since it wore all those fur tippets must be growing very respectable; next (here she visited Carlyle's sound- proof room at Chelsea) that genius since it needed all this coddling must be growing very delicate; and so at last she reached her final conclusion, which was of the highest importance but which, as we have already much over- passed our limit of six lines, we must omit.

often [actually proud on their own account.]

[They] had little family trees of their own.

Many had been gentry in a small way since the time of Elizabeth. One or two had [allied themselves married or their aunts] or uncles had married [one of those great] (had a streak of noble blood or kin bought them by) some degenerate [wild offshoot] of a nobleman [who tired of shooting had run violently to the other extreme and supposed himself married a

pa writer] married who had thrown his

gun down and married a clergyman's daughter. [All their] But [as for their

writing well] how did this affect that great object of Orlando's veneration-on which she had spent many thousands in

gratuities & pension, which she had sheltered & succoured, which it was the

passion of her life herself to practice- Literature ? [Here] (on this) she found it hard to give any opinion, for a very long time; for as soon as she had done one

book, there were a dozen more on her table. Also, half of them were not books

[simple] pure and simple but books about books. So that long before she had come

by any opinion of her own, she knew

(how) [what twenty different people thought it the greatest book and the worst book in the world.] that it was possible to hold twenty different opinions; of other

334


people: & as these were printed & signed & presumably paid for, she was bound to

respect them above her own. [In So, indeed Thus, indeed her,] So by degrees, [her interest began to wane, for] and she

began to change (lose) her view of literature as a wild and vivid flame, [pl] now the moor of Yorkshire,40 now the

crags of Scotland,41 [so] now some quiet English parsonage, flickeringly, indis-

criminately; a spirit incalculable and beautiful & venerable; and saw it instead as a portly & respectable gentleman, [with an income] who (never) was stupid; always telling people [what they ought to think;] [about some] & writing; & talking; & lecturing, & so that often when [not an

aft] & commemorating; & so that not a

day passed without [some either Sir Nicholas, or Mr.] a dinner, or a [cl] cele- bration, or an anniversary. So respectable, so busy, so opulent, so as a prosper- ous and [garrulous middle aged] gentleman (with a flower in his button hole) [Never a day] He wrote, he talked, he lectured. He [c/e] celebrated anniver- saries. He commemorated occasions. He

[ga] presided at dinners. He gave prizes. He was for ever-[for] sometimes she took a ticket and went to a Hall at [five in the] three o'clock in the afternoon (to hear a) delivery & series of lectures upon [Byron's] place in English Poetry, and

335


Shelley, Wordworth, Byron, or the Romantic Revival and some such subject, to [rows of] rows of old people, who

nodded, and rows of very young ones who gaped; & heaven knows why-for was it not all very nice & fluent &

interesting-what he said about

Shelley-Wordsworth, & Byron & the Romantic Revival-and she would go into the street, like one who has been half suffocated in folds of dirty plush, & the wind itself seemed to know more about literature than he did, or the old beggar woman, or the [placards on the lamp posts] newspaper [plac] placards on the

lamp posts. And she wired to (verify it &

put it fr) "My God, she would wire to

Marmaduke, My God! And then going home & went home & poured herself out a stiff tumbler of red Spanish wine-to feel [the] her so as to [feel the blood in her veins again, & to wondered how] For was she not dining with some literary Club or other; & [so she] where the re-

spectable body would [relax] (refresh) itself after [its] thus doing honour to the

dead, & expect, not a bank note slipped under its plate, but a compliment, all fresh and luscious, popped between its

lips ? *(At these gatherings, [she found herself for the most part next to] some

great man she would sit between the

greatest of their kind, in deference to her

ancestry rather [They There she would see them all the Tuppers and the Smiles &

336


the Smiths])* [Such] (This) then was liter-

ature, she concluded, (a body that's all) [at last : & [But wait:] & then, for it was now the day after the dinner, the footman announced that Lady [B was] A was come to fetch her Ladyship.

[So] The two ladies drove in a great yellow barouche hung on springs; all

through Kensington & the market garden to Chelsea, where Lady A.42 who was a

daring jolly woman, stout & buxom & of

the best [b ] blood in England, swore on her oath she would shew Orlando-since Orlando cherished these fellows [- dear

poor] (her dear) Carlyle. The footman de-

scended, and [w-] rapped at the (little) old, [small] shabby door. One of his

gigantic raps was enough. Out flew an

astonishing apparition:-[a woman] whose like [Orlando had not seen since] all eyes & [teeth] cheek bones & (that)?43 ["Don't] Be off with you, fool! She

screamed, "I'd have you know my Thomas is asleep.' "

Even Lady A. was snubbed. She sank back in her carriage?44 ["That's his scarecrow of a wife"] she said grumbl- ingly; & told the coachman to find out

(where) Tennyson's address. It was Far-

ringford, Freshwater Isle of Wight. They arrived one spring evening with the lilac in bloom. Half way up the carriage drive

they encountered an [invalid in a bath

337


chair] obstacle-a lady in a bath chair. The man was for passing her. But [she] the invalid raised herself. She stretched a frail (white) hand across the [path] horses noses. No [further,] she said: [My hus-

band] & the even the horses quivered. My husband (Alfred) is [engaged] writing a [poem]. Such was the awfulness of her demeanour that there was nothing for it but to return to London; & when Lady A.

proposed to visit [Florence] Browning in

Florence, Swinburne at Putney, or Meredith at Box Hill, Orlando refused; since [she] there cd. be no doubt that the

greater the genius, [the more it was hidden, from the more it was] that it was

plain that [genius was she could only exist in a] the greater the genius the more it was shut up. (sequestered.) [Sound proof] rooms, [invalid] (genius sheltered) It could only write if it was [shut up] enclosed in a sound proof room & protected by a wife. That was a change too, thought Orlando, comparing Dryden &

Tennyson; but But genius being inacces-

sible, she was forced to consort with the [riff raff & the scallywags]-the writers who managed to write without a trace

[of the] it:45 the Smiles, the Tuppers, the

Smiths, the Prossers, The Hemans, their (the names are legion: & all forgotten now, Foxes)

though the [bubble] once they were so

[den] [claimed immortality, & denied] Smith said that Tupper was immortal, & once Smiles said that Smith was and once

338


they were very bitter about it; all are forgotten now; & it is only [the] when the shelf creaks a little that we remember their names. The name of Fox is only remembered [now -] because [Volumnia Fox]46 [(her real name was V. Woolf)] [is (though the subject of one of] Mr. Arnold Ben- it

means) nett's [brilliant once thought it necessary to devote half an hour to her] demolish this [poor] lady (poor scribbler) (her real name was V. Woolf) in [one of his] (one of his) brilliant articles-worthy of a better subject. [She would have been forgotten without] [To waste half an hour upon such a] [That half hour] so wasted [might have produced another master- piece] She would have been forgotten anyhow, and the half hour spent on her might have given us another of his masterpieces.

[HP,295;HBJ,329]

And as Shelmerdine, now grown a fine sea captain, hale, fresh-coloured, and alert, leapt to the ground, there sprang up over his head a single wild bird.

"It is the goose!" Orlando cried. "The wild goose..."

And the twelfth stroke of midnight sounded; the twelfth stroke of midnight, Thursday, the eleventh of October, Nineteen hundred and Twenty-Eight.

And as Shelmerdine leapt from the aeroplane47 & ran to meet her a wild goose with its neck outstretched flew above them.

Shel! cried Orlando The [wild] goose is-

"[The secret of life] is ...."

The End. March 17th 1928.48

339


Notes and Commentary

This is the day Virginia Woolf began the Orlando manuscript, and this is her first title page. The second and final title page reads simply ORLANDO,

Oct. 8 1927 a BIOGRAPHY. In the margin she notes two dates thus: Oct. 195 October 1553 was apparently the date she chose for the fictional beginning of her hero's life.

2 Woolf changed the commencement of her protagonist's life from 1500 to 1553. In the text she says of Orlando that . . . "he was not yet seventeen-and that the sixteenth century had still some years of its course to run .. ." (18) If we believe that in Orlando Woolf attempts to echo (though often satirically) Vita's desire to resurrect the Sackville's heritage, this change in dating is understand- able. 1553 corresponds closely to the date of Thomas Sackville's sixteenth birthday, and it also marks the beginning of Queen Mary's reign. However, Thomas Sackville was not granted Knole until he was thirty, and then not by Queen Mary, but by Queen Elizabeth, in 1566. This playing fast and loose with dates in the manuscript prefigures the spirit of the text, in which Woolf manipulates "history" in order to get at the truth of "fiction."

3 In its most obvious aspects, Orlando's character reflects the changing temperaments of the Sackville family, who are seen as prototypes of their age, and whose unity is borne out in their continuing history, from the Elizabethan Age to the present. However, the development of Orlando's character was also an occasion for Woolf to think about the problems of the female artist. As early as 1920, Virginia Woolf was exploring the idea that the character of the female artist develops throughout the centuries only if certain positive conditions exist. The publication of Arnold Bennett's Our Women, in 1920, with its attendant publicity, led Woolf to answer Bennett through the correspondence columns of the New Statesman where Desmond McCarthy had reviewed Bennett's book favorably. In an article called The Intellectual Status of Women (October, 1920) she concludes that "all activity of the mind should be so encouraged that there will always be in existence a nucleus of women who think, invent, imagine, and create as freely as men do, and with as little fear of ridicule and condescen- sion." Later in A Room of One's Own (1929), Woolf would dramatize the absence of a supportive environment for writing in the fictional persona of Shake- speare's sister.

The various literary connotations of the hero, Orlando, provided Woolf with the perfect metaphoric vehicle in Orlando for her conception of changing character, "taking different aspects of the character in different centuries." Her earliest idea of "Orlando, a young nobleman" (AWD, September 18, 1927) was enriched by Ariosto's Orlando Furioso (1532). As a doer, not a dreamer, this Orlando would not be able to write the poetry he envisioned. Also biographi- cally, Woolf was seeking some comic way to deal with Vita's reputed cruelty, coupled with her physical passion. In a letter written to Vita on October 13, 1927, she says, "Is it true you love giving pain?" (Letters, III, 430). The notion of the hero as fierce warrior, and the hero furiously in love was the answer. This is exactly what Ariosto achieved in Orlando Furioso, when he welded the Arthurian and Carolingian traditions. He took the hero in love from the Bre- ton matter of Arthur, and combined it with the hero as fierce warrior from the

340


matter of France concerning Charlemagne. In Ariosto's poem, the mighty Or- lando is furious because of his passion for Angelica, and in Orlando, Orlando is furious because of his passion for Sasha, the Russian princess. (I wonder if it is merely coincidental that Angelica Garnett was the model for the photograph of the Russian princess as a child?)

The Orlando who was denied her rightful property for purely arbitrary reasons would have had her literary model in Shakespeare's As You Like It. As we know, Shakespeare's Orlando is the third son of Sir Roland de Boys, and he is being deprived of the advantages due to his position-by the envy of his eldest brother, Oliver, who plots his destruction at the hands of the champion wres- tler at the court of France. Orlando flees with his servant to the forest of Arden, where his banished lover, Rosalind, is posing as a page. Rosalind reveals her sex and they declare their love for one another. In the meantime, Rosalind's father, the Old Duke comes out of banishment, is restored to his rightful throne, and Rosalind and Orlando marry.

The real Renaissance for women is not possible except in the present time, which for Woolf was 1928. And even then, only through the fantastic does Vita-Orlando solve the two essential problems which must be resolved before women can write: she spiritually and materially reclaims her own property, and her husband, who is as androgynous as she is, encourages her to create as freely as men do.

4 Though most of Woolf's diary entries depict the pure delight she felt during the composition of Orlando, she was also aware of her own tendency to be trapped in her self-conscious musings. For example, in a diary entry written on December 22, 1927, she says, "The dream is too often about myself. To correct this; and to forget one's own sharp absurd little personality, reputation and the rest of it, one should read; see outsiders; think more; write more logically; above all be full of work; and practise anonymity." It is also interesting that one of the possible subtitles was here, as in the first manuscript version of The Waves, "Moments of Being." 5 In the manuscript this line is followed by a paragraph which is deleted completely in the final version.

6 In the margin of the manuscript, Woolf dates this line Oct 24, 1927. She also designates this as Section IV.

7 In the manuscript this line is followed by a paragraph which is deleted completely in the final version.

8 In the margin of the manuscript, Woolf dates this line 29th Oct. and, as in the text, she calls it Chapter Two.

9 Mrs. Grimsditch and Mr. Dupper were the real names of Knole servants in the seventeenth century. They were taken from Vita Sackville-West's Knole and the Sackvilles (Ernest Benn, 1958), 86.

10 This is an allusion to the Sackville crypt at Withyam, Sussex. In the text, Woolf has deleted all the lines following the phrase "one after another."

n Violet Trefusis, Vita Sackville-West's friend and lover over a period of seventeen years, was the model for Sasha, the Russian princess. Virginia Woolf once met her.

12 In the manuscript this line is followed by a sentence and a long paragraph which are deleted in the final version. This manuscript allusion to Shakespeare strengthens the veiled allusions in the text. Vita Sackville-West

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conjectured that Shakespeare may have visited Thomas Sackville at Knole (Knole and the Sackvilles, pp. 58-59). Here Woolf is making that wish a reality. Nicholas Greene is modelled on Edmund Gosse, the nineteenth century critic.

13 In the manuscript this long sentence is followed by six paragraphs which are deleted in the text. Here Woolf is parodying the style of her own "Time Passes" section in To the Lighthouse, as well as the character of Mrs. McNab.

14 When Woolf wrote Orlando, she was, among other things, distancing herself from her lover, Vita Sackville-West, who had begun to prefer Mary Campbell, wife of the poet, Roy Campbell. The Campbells took a cottage near Long Barn in the late summer of 1927. Woolf was suffering intensely from her affair with Vita. This description of Love evokes her desolation, though she is careful to note that Orlando alone is responsible for the opinions expressed!

15 In alluding to Comus, Woolf is drawing upon the conventional participa- tion of members of the Court in the seventeenth century as they played in this masque. She is ironically praising the scene because it is played by some of the greatest names in England.

16 These names were Charles Howard, the first Earl of Carlisle, from 1629 to 1685. Five descendents were Earls of Carlisle. The last one, George William Frederick Howard, was the seventh Earl between 1802-1864.James Stanley was the seventh Earl of Derby from 1607 to 1651. Nine Stanleys were Earls of Derby, beginning with Thomas Stanley, who was the first Earl in 1435. Philip Herbert was the fourth Earl of Pembroke between 1584 and 1650. The first Earl of the Herbert line was Sir William Herbert, who was Earl until 1469. Nine Herberts were Earls over a period of four hundred years. The Sackville name is self-explanatory. Gilbert Talbot was the seventh and last Earl of Shrewsbury between 1553 and 1616. He was preceded by five Talbots; John Talbot was the first Earl in 1388.

17 Though the text and the manuscript are similar here, there are some illuminating differences. In the manuscript, solitude is associated with freedom and the right to observe rather than participate. In a sense this is very personal, because Woolf, in writing Orlando, removes herself from an active involvement with Vita, and observes her in solitude.

18 Thomas Sackville, the first Earl of Dorset, was given this book by Mary Queen of Scots, and it was still at Knole when Orlando was written. Also, as Vita Sackville-West notes, Thomas Sackville "was one of the forty appointed on the commission for the trial of Mary Stuart, and although his name is not amongst those who proceeded to Fotheringay, nor later in the Star Chamber at Westminster when she was condemned to death, yet he was sent to announce the sentence to death, and received from her in recognition of his tact and gentleness in conveying this news the triptych and carved group of the Proces- sion to Calvary now on the altar in the chapel at Knole." (Knole & the Sackvilles, 47.)

19 Vita Sackville-West's The Land, published by William Heinemann in 1927 was the model for Orlando's The Oak Tree. The Land was awarded the Haw- thornden Prize in February, 1927,' and was read as a performance twice. Once on November 11, 1927, Dorothy Wellesley read parts of it to the Sheffield League of Arts. Five years after its publication, in May, 1932, it was produced in a tithe-barn at Elmstead, near Ashford, Kent. The poem was spoken by two tellers, and the action was mimed and danced on stage. All the performers

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were amateurs, with the exception of the chief dancer and the pianist. Though Woolf was enthusiastic about this conception of the poem, she was not im- pressed with the poem itself.

In Portrait of a Marriage, Nigel Nicolson says, "Virginia did not admire Vita as a writer, and said so in a way Vita would not mind." By The Land,

... she was disappointed, but very sweet about it. She says it is a contribution to English literature, and is a solid fact against which one can bear up without fear of its giving way. She also says it is one of the few interesting poems-I mean the information part. [Vita Sackville- West to Harold Nicolson, January 26, 1926.]

20 In the manuscript this line is followed by a long paragraph which is deleted in the final version. Woolf calls this section V.

21 This is a reference to Long Barn, the country cottage the Nicolson's bought in 1915. The house is situated at the southern end of Weald, two miles south of Sevenoaks and Knole House. It is a small 14th century manor house reputed to be the birthplace of William Caxton.

22 Two words in this insertion are illegible. 23 Throughout this passage Woolf s ambivalence toward Vita's wealth, an-

cestry, and talent is apparent. As I said earlier, Woolf did not always admire Vita's writing. She also felt that Vita was not as bright as she: "No. In brain and insight she is not as highly organised as I am. But then she is aware of this and so lavishes on me the maternal protection which, for some reason, is what I have always most wished from everyone." [Quentin Bell, Virginia Woolf, II, 118.]

In a letter to her husband, dated November 20, 1926, Vita says, "I got a letter from Virginia, which contains one of her devilish, shrewd, psychological pounces. She asks if there is something in me which does not vibrate, a 'something reserved, muted . . . The thing I call "central transparency" sometimes fails you.' Damn the woman she has put her finger on it. There is something muted. What is it, Hadji?" Woolf actually believed that Vita's aristo- cratic advantages sometimes encouraged a kind of indolence, which she, here, attributes to Vita's male ancestors. On the other hand, Woolf upholds Vita's belief that her ancestry was continuously a succession of literary figures. For example, later in the passage, Woolf seems to conflate the libraries of Long Barn and Knole, when she writes of "sermons" and "translations of sermons." This is an allusion to John Donne, who, as Vita Sackville-West says, used to preach in their family chapel, the Chapel of the Archbishops, "when he was Rector of Sevenoaks, reducing Lady Anne Clifford to tears." (Knole and the Sackvilles, 32.) Woolf also alludes to Spenser's Faerie Queene "with the poet's autograph" in this passage. Though there is no evidence that Spenser presented his Faerie Queene to any member of the family, he did write a sonnet to Thomas Sackville and his tragedy, Gorboduc.

24 A painting of Geoffrey Chaucer hangs in The Brown Gallery at Knole. Identification of the painter is approximated, and noted, "After Occleve."

25 Desmond McCarthy sometimes wrote for the New Statesman under the pseudonym, "Affable Hawk." In a letter to the editor of the New Statesman (October 16, 1920), Woolf responds to a particularly offensive article where McCarthy claims that because no poet of Sappho's genius has appeared from

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600 B.C. to the eighteenth century, one can assume that during that time there were no poetesses of potential genius. Woolf replies,

The case of Sappho, though so remote, throws, I think, a little light upon the problem. I quote J. A. Symonds: 'Several circumstances con- tributed to aid the development of lyric poetry in Lesbos. The customs of the Aeolians permitted more social and domestic freedom than was common in Greece. Aeolian women were not confined to the harem or subjected to the rigorous discipline of the Spartans. While mixing freely with male society, they were highly educated and accustomed to express their sentiment to an extent unknown elsewhere in history.'

26 Orlo Williams published The Good Englishwoman at about the same time Arnold Bennett's Our Women (1920) came out. Both were sexist in their treatment of women.

27 In the manuscript, Woolf calls this "Chapter Four," and on the preceding page, she dates it "Feb 1st."

28 In the manuscript, this line is followed by a long paragraph which is deleted in the text.

29 This long digression on writing which Woolf excluded from the published version is interesting not only in its allusions and satire of Orlando's continuing sentimentality as a writer, but also in the questions Woolf raises about situations when a writer is unable to write. Orlando's poem which begins "And sorrowing I to see the summer flowers" is from a stanza of Thomas Sackville's "Induction to the Mirror for Magistrates." The questions about writing were personal, and this is one example where the fictional Orlando, Vita, and Virginia were merged. Here Woolf claims that the very constitution of the poem may change if it is taken up and put by again and again. She was always preoccupied with the circumstances which allowed her to write.

30 This word is illegible in the manuscript. 31 This line is from Victoria Sackville-West's, The Land. 32 Between the ages of thirteen and seventeen, Vita wrote six full-length

novels (one in French) and three plays (one in Italian). Nearly all the manuscripts survive at Sissinghurst. Many of the novels were violent and melod- ramatic; many were abstract, and most were peopled with Kings and Queens. The King's Secret was her first novel; it totals seventy-five thousand words and is about Knole in the time of Charles II.

33 This word is illegible in the manuscript. 34 The Land is more like Thomson's The Seasons than any other English

poem. It is divided into four sections called Winter, Spring, Summer, and Autumn. 35 In the manuscript this line is followed by two long paragraphs com-

pletely deleted in the text. 36 Marmaduke was Harold Nicolson, not in character but in function. Like

Marmaduke, Nicolson had made a journey around Cape Horn. Also Nicolson was frequently absent from Vita on diplomatic missions abroad. It is worth noting too that Vita signed her letters "Mar" when she wrote Nicolson, because it was his pet name for her.

37 The Nicolsons came from Skye. 38 All this happened at Sevenoaks, Kent, in February, 1910, when the

Sackvilles won the legitimacy (Pepita) case. High Street is the main street in

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Sevenoaks and there are still taverns there called the Bull and Stag. For the complete story of this case, read Nigel Nicolson's Portrait of a Marriage, 65-68.

39 Virginia Woolf admired Christina Rossetti's honesty and her disregard for social convention. In her essay "I Am Christina Rossetti," Woolf writes of the Rossetti family's poverty and their unassuming home in Hallam Street (London). "They kept themselves to themselves, dressed as they liked, en- tertained Italian exiles, among them organ grinders and other distressed com- patriots, and made ends meet by teaching and writing and other odd jobs."

40 This is obviously an allusion to Emily Bronte's romantic Yorkshire moors which she memorialized in Wuthering Heights.

41 Here one thinks of Sir Walter Scott's The Heart of Midlothian. 42 Lady Sybil Colefax was the epitome of the unreflective woman of society,

who both fascinated and appalled Virginia Woolf. She was the wife of Sir Arthur Colefax, and lived at Argyll House, Chelsea, where she created a salon for London's social and cultural life. Woolf rarely refused Lady Colefax's invitations, though she often satirized her. This fictional Lady A was much like the Lady Colefax Woolf described in her diary. For example on November 16, 1923, Woolf writes:

As for Ly Colefax, there she sits painted and emphatic at the head of her table, broadcheeked, a little coarse, kindly glass eyed, affectionate to me almost, capable, apparently disinterested-I mean if she likes to listen to clever talk & to buy it with a lunch of four courses & good wine; I see no harm in it. Its a taste; not a vice."

(The Diary of Virginia Woolf, ed. Anne Olivier Bell, II, 275.)

43 This word is illegible in the manuscript. 44 Five words following "carriage" are unclear. 45 Here Woolf is alluding to actual hack writers of the past, at least in three

instances. Martin Farquhar Tupper (1810-1889) became a synonym for the contemptible common place. For over half a century he was the butt of the critics, yet he continued to write. Alexander Smith (1830-1867) was a Scottish poet, and Felicia Dorothea Hemans (1793-1835), at fourteen, published "En- gland and Spain, or Valour and Patriotism, a Poem" which was inspired by her brothers' involvement in the Peninsular War.

46 Volumnia Fox is a character in Marjorie Strachey's Bloomsbury novel. Arnold Bennett did not call Virginia Woolf Volumnia Fox in either of his critical articles about her. A running battle between them did rage, however. Here she may have been naming herself in a self-caricature in what was, after all, her most extensive key novel. At any rate, she had read Bennett's article called "Another Criticism of the New School," which he published in the Evening Standard, December 2, 1926. In it he says:

I have read two and a half of Mrs. Woolf's books. First, The Common Reader, which is an agreeable collection of elegant essays on literary subjects. Second, Jacob's Room, which I achieved with great difficulty. Third, Mrs. Dalloway, which beat me. I could not finish it, because I could not discover what it was really about, what was its direction, and what Mrs. Woolf intended to demonstrate by it.

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To express myself differently, I failed to discern what was its moral basis. As regards character-drawing, Mrs. Woolf (in my opinion) told us ten thousand things about Mrs. Dalloway, but did. not show us Mrs. Dalloway. I got from the novel no coherent picture of Mrs. Dalloway. Nor could I see much trace of construction, or ordered movement towards a climax in either Jacob's Room or Mrs. Dalloway. Further, I thought that both books seriously lacked vitality. These three defects, I maintain, are the characteristic defects of the new school of which Mrs. Woolf is the leader. The people in them do not sufficiently live, and hence, they cannot claim our sympathy or even our hatred; they leave us indifferent. Logical construction is absent; concen- tration on the theme (if any) is absent; the interest is dissipated; material is wantonly or clumsily wasted, instead of being employed economically as in the great masterpieces. Problems are neither clearly stated nor clearly solved."

[Arnold Bennett: The Evening Standard Years; 'Books and Persons' 1926-1931,

ed. Andrew Mylett (London, 1974), 5]

Unlike her violent reaction to his first critical article, published in Cassell's Weekly in March 1923, when she responded with the aggressive and polemical Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown, she wrote Vita on December 8, two days after his article came out, "But Arnold Bennett has sold my books twice as fast as before: 6 sell instead of one." (Letters, III, 307.)

47 Harold Nicolson returned from Paris to Knole in 1920, where he landed in the park.

48 The day the manuscript of Orlando was completed.

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APPENDIX A

From Vita Sackville-West to Harold Nicolson On going back to Knole after her father's death

Long Barn Oct 10th 1928 Wednesday

My own darling Hadji, Well, yesterday I went to Knole to tea with Charlie.1 It was raining, and I

passed through the empty Colonnade, and through the dining room where two places were laid for dinner, for him and Diana, as it might have been for me and Dada-and there were the same four little round vases with pink flowers like sponges-and Booth had put some of the silver out and the pink lamp was in the middle of the table. I went through into Dada's sitting room; there was a fire; and bronze chrysanthemums. They had not yet arrived. Booth came in and said "Oh, his Lordship has just telephoned to say he would be here directly, and would you wait." Then we had a conversation, getting rather muddled up-"Perhaps you would mention his Lordship's guns to his Lordship, madam,"-and so on. Then a brisk step,-so like Dada's,-and Charlie came in with Diana. Very nice, both of them. Charlie had had about eight typewritten pages from 131, which I wish you could have seen-all muddle and abuse, to which he had not returned any answer at all. We talked,-it was all very bloody. Then I came home; it was raining; I had to stop the motor on the hill because I was crying and couldn't see to drive. I came home and found Valerie2 who was very tactful and sweet,-really she is a very sweet child,-and Dotz3 came to dinner. But I don't like going to Knole; I don't, I don't, I don't; and although I approve whole-heartedly of Charlie's activities,-such as altering the ball-room window, and removing these bloody plaster casts from the Cartoon Gallery (which I never could get Dada to do,)-I absurdly mind anything being altered. Hadji understand that rather paradoxical and quite illogical resentment? Yet they are all things I should have done at once myself. Also he has had those horrid busts taken away from under the staircase; a great improvement.

Well, well-that's enough. I feel as though a knife had been plunged into my heart the day Dada died, and as though it had cut its way slowly round ever since, until a great chunk of flesh had been cut out, and had now fallen bleeding to the ground. ...

No letter from Hadji today. You ought to get Orlando tomorrow, and I shall long to hear what you think of it. I also ought to get it tomorrow; and can scarcely believe that I shall manage to survive until then. There are compensa- tions in life-and I must try to put Knole out of my heart as one puts a dead love. But it takes a long time, and hurts like the devil. And what is it, after all?

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just stones and mortar. But Dada was not, and BM4 was not, and I have lost them all at one swoop.

But I have got you. Your own

Mar Very silly

Her reaction to Orlando

Long Barn Thursday Oct. 11, 1928

My own darling, I write to you in the middle of reading Orlando, in such a turmoil of

excitement and confusion that I scarcely know where (or who!) I am. Write to Hadji rounding Cape Horn. It came this morning by the first post and I have been reading it ever since, and am now half way through. Virginia sent it to me in a lovely leather binding,-bless her. O Lord how I wonder what you will think of it. It seems to me more brilliant, more enchanting, more rich and lavish, than anything she has done. It is like a cloak encrusted with jewels and sprinkled with rose-petals. I admit I can't see straight about it. Parts of it make me cry, parts of it make me laugh; the whole of it dazzles and bewilders me. It maddens me that you should not be here, so that we could read it simultaneously. I scarcely slept with excitement all night, and woke up feeling as though it were my birthday, or wedding day, or something unique,-not that birthdays are unique, or wedding days either necessarily, though mine certainly was, if you know what I mean. Nicholas Greene you will recognize as Gosse, the Archduchess Harriet as Lord Lascelles! Well,-I don't know,-it seems to me a book unique in English literature, having everything in it: romance, wit, seriousness, lightness, beauty, imagination, style; with Sir Thomas Browne and Swift for parents. I feel infinitely honoured at having been the peg on which it was hung; and very humble. Oh I so want to know what Hadji thinks. I must now pull myself together and answer the lovely long letter I had from you last night-my own, my darling-and another this morning ....

Darling, now I am going to finish Orlando. What fun. I looked nervously to see what had been said about Hadji but could see nothing except a most romantic presentment of a young sailor! I like the idea of Hadji's devotion to his profession being transmuted into sailing round the Horn. And Pippin. And Canute. And Louise. Oh God!

Yours,

Mar

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Long Barn Friday Oct 12th

1928 My own darling Hadjikins;

Well, I finished Orlando just in time yesterday to write Virginia a long, confused, and rather ennue letter about it. Now that I have finished it I still think it an absolutely enchanting book. Do you? Do you notice the craft of it,-how the style changes from the florid exaggeration of Elizabethan times to the purer directness of the 18th cent.-and so down to the vividness and psychological turmoil of modernity? The style and texture of it seem to me to be above reproach, as also the beauty, wit, and imaginativeness. The only criticism I have is this: (and you must keep this entirely to yourself, and not tell Eddy5 or anyone)-that the general inference is too inconclusive. I mean, she has slightly confused the issues in making Orlando 1) marry, 2) have a child. Shelmerdine does not really contribute anything either to Orlando's character or to the problems of the story, (except as a good joke at the expense of the Victorian passion for marriage) and as for the child it contributes less than nothing, but even strikes rather a false note. Marriage & motherhood would either modify or destroy Orlando, as a character: they do neither. Nor is the marriage with Shelmerdine offered as a satisfactory solution for the difficulties of matrimony. The nearest approach to a solution of the total study, is when Orlando realizes the value of Ecstasy, i.e., of Life as opposed to Literature. There is one other objection to Shelmerdine; and that is, that one has grown so accustomed to the idea of Orlando's immortality, that one does not know how to fit Shelmerdine into it. Will he be immortal too? if not, one has to face the unpleasant fact that one day he will die & Orlando be left desolate. No, I think Shelmerdine, as a husband, was a mistake. Tell me if you agree about all this.

I enclose a telegram which I had from V. this morning!

Your own adoring,

Mar

Do you notice V's joke, that Orlando calls Shelmerdine Mar?

Long Barn Sat. Oct. 13th

1928 My own darling love,

(Second paragraph) No words can paint my impatience to hear your opinion of Orlando. But I

don't suppose I shall hear til Monday. The more I think about it, the weaker I think the end is! I simply cannot make out what was in her mind. What does the wild goose stand for? Time? Love? Death? Marriage? Obviously a person of V's intellect has had some object in view, but what was it? The symbolism doesn't come off. It doesn't come through. A pity; for nearly all the rest is perfect. What does Eddy think? I expect he is cross.

Yours,

Mar

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Long Barn Monday night Oct. 15th 1928

My own darling, (Penultimate paragraph) Bless you again my darling. I feel somehow that Knole knows about

Orlando and is pleased. Funny mystical side Hadji has to him which he would rather die than

admit to. Funny conviction that Knole knows; and doesn't like Anne; and is sorry about Dada and like me; but goes on being, just the same. Funny it is that I should have written years and years ago, before I had ever really thought about anything, and when I could express myself only in a deplorable but perhaps straightforward style! "For many come, and soon their tale is told, and thou remainest, dimly feeling pain, aware the time has come to don again the sober mourning of the very old."

And

"Thy stateliness knows neither joy, nor sorrow, -I will not wound such dignity with tears"

Orlando

Her feelings about Virginia Woolfs character

Vezelay-Thursday Sept 27 1928

My own darling Hadji, (Second paragraph) Darling this is such a lovely place. Like an Italian hill town. I have changed

into pencil because Virginia, who is tired, has fallen asleep, and pencil makes a less scratchy noise. She is very very sweet, and I feel extraordinarily protective towards her. The combination of that brilliant brain and that fragile body is very loveable-so independent in all mental ways, so dependent in all practical ways. Really I think she has an almost perfect character-and certainly a perfect mind. She hopes Hadji will go to see her when he is here on leave. I have never known anyone who was so profoundly sensitive and who made less of a business of their sensitiveness. She would be a terrible object lesson for some people. Dotz? Eddy?

Your own loving loving Mar

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Long Barn Tuesday Oct 2nd 1928

My own daring love, (Eighth paragraph) The expedition to Burgundy was a tremendous success. I feel I now

understand V. through and through. She has a sweet and childlike nature; from which her intellect is completely separate. But of course no one would believe this except Leonard & Vanessa. Darling, I did enjoy it all, only I wanted Hadji to be there. V. says she is going to write to you.

Virginia Woolf's suicide

Sissinghurst Castle, Kent

March 31st 1941 My darling

I have just had the most awful shock: Virginia has killed herself. It is not in the papers, but I got letters from Leonard and also from Vanessa, telling me. It was last Friday. Leonard came home to find a note saying she was going to commit suicide and they think she has drowned herself as he found her stick floating on the river. He says she had not been well for the last few weeks & was terrified of going mad again. He says "It was, I suppose, the strain of the war and finishing her book & she could not rest or eat."

Why, oh why, did he leave her alone knowing all this? He must be reproaching himself terribly, poor man. They had not yet found the body.

I simply can't take it in,-that lovely mind, that lovely spirit. And she seemed so well when I last saw her and I had a joky letter from her only a couple of weeks ago.

She must have been quite out of her mind or she would never have brought such sorrow and horror on Leonard & Vanessa.

Vanessa has seen him & says he was amazingly self-controlled and calm, but insisted on being left alone. I cannot help wondering if he will follow her example. I do not see him living without her.

Perhaps you better not say to anyone that it was suicide, though I suppose they can't keep it out of the papers. I suppose there will have to be an inquest.

What a nightmare for L. to have to go through. When they find the body and all that.

Yours

Mar

Nothing from Niggs today.

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April 8, 1941 Sissinghurst Castle

My darling, I went to see Vanessa yesterday at Charleston. She could not have been

nicer and told me all about it. Rather to my dismay she said Leonard wanted to see me. So I went to Monk's House. He was having his tea, just one tea cup on the table where they always had tea. The house full of his flowers and all Virginia's things lying about as usual. He said Let us go somewhere more comfortable and took me up to her sitting room. There was her needle-work on a chair and all her coloured wools hanging over a sort of little towel horse which she had made for them. Her thimble on the table. Her scribbling block with her writing on it. The windows from which one can see the river.

I said Leonard, I do not like your being here alone like this. He turned those piercing blue eyes on me and said It's the only thing to do.

I saw then that he was right. But it must take some courage. He talked about the whole thing perfectly calmly and in great detail,

shirking nothing. Some phrases hit. He said when he couldn't find her any- where "I went up to a derelict house she was fond of in the Downs, called Mad Misery, but she wasn't there."

I remembered her telling me about Mad Misery and saying that she would take me there one day.

They have been dragging the river but are now giving up the search. As the river is tidal, she has probably been carried out to sea. I hope so. I hope they will never find her.

She could swim; I know this because of a story she once told me about herself and Rupert Brooke at Cambridge, when they were both very young, and he took off all his clothes and plunged naked into a moonlit pool, and she thought she must do likewise, so did although very shy, and they swam about together. But it appears that when she went out to drown herself she was wearing big gun boots (which she seldom did because she hated them) and if those had filled with water they would have dragged her down. Also she may have weighted her pockets with stones. The river is banked up with stones.

The only thing that puzzles them is that they never found her hat floating. But Vanessa thinks it had an elastic to keep it on, so went down with her.

Yours,

Mar 7.30 Thursday.

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APPENDIX B

From Harold Nicolson to Vita Sackville-West

Saturday October 13, 1928 British Embassy

My own darling, (Third paragraph) My dear one. I do understand it all. And while I was still by your anguished

letter, there came Orlando. A book in which you and Knole are identified forever, a book which will perpetuate that identity into years when both you and I are dead. This is an intimate secret which one book holds probably for you & me alone: Virginia may not have understood it: But I feel so grateful to her genius for providing what is really a -consolation. Thus to me the book is far more solemn than for other people. It touches on what I have felt more deeply than anything in my life: on Dada's death, on your loss of Knole, on my devotion to you my darling & of my very tenderness to you. I feel that Virginia has given you something which is a solace for the moment & which makes you & Knole triumph together-oh my dear.

APPENDIX C

Relevant Correspondence Between Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West

V to VS-W Monday 31 Jan [1927] 52 Tavistock Square [W.C.I.]

My dear Honey, (Seventh paragraph) Yes, I like you to write good poetry. My parting lecture was not very

coherent. I was trying to get at something about the thing itself before it's made into anything: the emotion, the idea. The danger for you with your sense of tradition and all those words-a gift of the Gods though-is that you help this too easily into existence. I don't mean that one ought to strain, to write showily, expressively, or so on: only that one ought to stand outside with one's hands folded, until the thing has made itself visible: we born writers tend to be ready with our silver spoons too early: I mean I think there are odder, deeper, more angular thoughts in your mind than you have let come out.

Yr

Berg V [Letters, III, 321.]

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VS-W Sissinghurst Castle to V 29th Feb [1927]

It is quite true that you have had infinitely more influence on me intellec- tually than anyone, and for this alone I love you. I feel my muscles hardening. Yes my dear Virginia I was at a crossways just about the time I first met you, like this.

Bad novels Good poetry

Berg-unpublished 52 Tavistock Square, W. C. I.

V to VS-W [20? March 1928]

Dearest, Mrs. Nicolson, (Third paragraph) Did you feel a sort of tug, as if your neck was being broken on Saturday

last [17 March] at 5 minutes to one? That was when he died-or rather stopped talking, with three little dots ... Now every word will have to be re-written, and I see no chance of finishing it by September-It is all over the place, incohe- rent, intolerable, impossible-and I am sick of it. The question now is, will my feelings for you be changed? I've lived in you all these months-coming out, what are you really like? Do you exist? Have I made you up?

Virginia Berg [Letters, III, 473]

Sissinghurst Castle VS-W to V April 3rd, 1928

You absolutely stumped me by your remarks, 'Do I exist or have you made me up?' I always foresaw that, when you had killed Orlando off. Well, I'll tell you one thing, if you like,-no, love-me one tittle less, now that Orlando is dead, you shall never set eyes on me again, except by chance at one of Sybil's parties. I won't be fictitious. I won't be loved solely in an astral body, or in Virginia's world. So write quickly and say I'm still real .. Your adoring and perfectly solid

Orlando Berg-unpublished

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Notes to Appendices

1 Charles Sackville-West succeeded his brother (Vita's father) as the fourth Lord Sackville after Lord Sackville died at Knole on January 28, 1928. Charles Sackville had married Ann Bigelow (called Diana) of New York, an actress.

2 Valerie Taylor was an actress, and Cecil Taylor's ex-wife; she stayed with Vita at Long Barn for a few months in 1927, where she had a brief affair with Eddy Sackville-West, Vita's first cousin.

3 Dorothy Wellesley went with Vita to Persia in 1927, and was in fact one of Virginia Woolf's rivals for Vita's affections.

4 Short for Bon Mama. Vita's nickname was for her mother, Lady Sackville, who was not dead, but was alienated from Vita after Lord Sackville's death. Lady Sackville brought suit against Charles Sackville over the ownership of Knole.

5 Edward Sackville-West, Vita's first cousin, was both a musician and a novelist. He was extremely attached to Knole.

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Woolf 1928 Orlando Moore 1979

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