Old Pages and New Readings in Virginia Woolf's Orlando

I think the main point is that it should be free.Yet what about form?Let us suppose that the Room will hold it together.¹

These words, written by Virginia Woolf in the manuscript draft of Jacob's Room, convey a close connection between the ideas in a book and the binding that holds it together. As scholars of literature, we encounter the physical book on a daily basis. Vast narrative landscapes are contained paradoxically within the confining material structure of the book as a solid object. While book history has emerged as a striking field of study in its own right, consideration of the physical book seldom enters the broader literary discourse of modernity. Woolf's formidable role as publisher, author, and businesswoman foregrounds the importance of the book as a modernist artifact. As a result, the dynamic literary cultures of production, composition, and marketing converge in her canon in illuminating and complex ways.

In a recent issue of Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, Jane de Gay reviewed Emily Blair's new book, Virginia Woolf and the Nineteenth-Century Domestic Novel.² Gay points to the "domestic architecture" Blair observes in her study and suggests that "adopting the trope of the room" was a construct that allowed Woolf to carve out spaces for women where a break with common ideologies was possible (p. 170). Blair's book and Gay's review similarly emphasize Woolf's exacting dedication to the minutiae of domestic space, following Michael Levenson's declaration that "Modernism begins in a room."³ The very titles Woolf gave her works—Jacob's Room, A Room of One's Own, "A Haunted House"—instantly evoke the interior architecture of the room. Traditionally, narrative and the book as a physical object have been held together through an analogy of space, something we experience each time we enter a library or cluttered bookshop. Spatial orientation and environmental conditions inflect the experience of reading a text. The imaginative and physical spaces of the narrative overlap with the material spaces of readership and circulation, making the words in a book present in the spaces around us and filling the rooms we inhabit. Attention to the physical space of one of Woolf's most carefully constructed works, Orlando: A Biography, led me down new corridors in Woolf criticism. In researching the book in the archives, I was able to detect material variants that bear significantly on a reading of the novel as a whole. Like the tapestries that hang on the walls of Orlando's estate, narrative meaning is often found in the borders of a space. A text that eludes fixed meaning, Orlando's variants reflect the elusive nature of truth in biographical narratives. Vita Sackville-West, the inspiration for Orlando, often wrote about the real tapestries that hung in the Ambassador's room in her ancestral home, but her descriptions of the pictorial content vary. Like the spatial configuration of a room, lined with fabrics, pictures, and windows to the outside, Orlando invites reading in the margins. My entry into divergent spaces of publication revealed a tradition of transatlantic printing and a new set of paratextual possibilities for interpretation.⁴

I began my research in the University of Virginia Special Collections Library, which houses a first edition of Orlando (1928). It was my intention to position the physical text in the particular historical moment closest to Woolf's original authorial imprint. To my surprise, the first edition was an American publication—a limited edition contracted and published by the New York-based Crosby Gaige. Gaige was an eccentric Broadway producer, a connoisseur of gourmet cuisine, and, for a short period of time, a printer of fine limited edition books renowned for their "quality and sheer beauty."⁵ Publishing from a printing press established in a barn adjacent to his home, he had a relatively successful go at the publishing industry before his finances were severely damaged by the stock market crash of 1929. Given Woolf's own successful relationship to first edition publications of her work as co-publisher with Leonard Woolf...