Orlando by Virginia Woolf (review)

Virginia Woolf started writing Orlando at the start of October 1927. Five months earlier, she had published To the Lighthouse, a book which raised interesting questions for her about genre. 'I have an idea', she wrote in her diary on 27 June 1925, 'that I will invent a new name for my books to supplant "novel". A new—by Virginia Woolf. But what? Elegy?' She thought about genre again, in different ways, for Orlando. This book is partly a fantasy, in which the central character lives for four hundred years and changes sex along the way, and partly a fictional biography of Woolf's friend and lover, Vita Sackville-West.

This new edition of Orlando is edited by the distinguished Woolf scholars Suzanne Raitt and Ian Blyth. It is more than 700 pages long, with a lengthy and informative introduction, detailed textual apparatus, and many helpful explanatory notes. It is part of Cambridge University Press's scholarly edition of all Woolf's major works under the general editorship of Susan Sellers, Jane Goldman, and Bryony Randall.

When she finished the book in March 1928, Woolf wondered if it was 'all a joke'. 'But in fact', argue Raitt and Blyth, 'Orlando is one of her most ambitious and complex texts. In it, [Woolf] experiments with a new form for the novel; she tells a playful version of Vita's life-story; […]; she re-imagines the genre of biography; she offers a detailed social history of England; she recreates some of the golden moments of British literature; and she sketches a detailed geographical history of the city of London' (p. xxxvii). The book is both fact and fiction, 'truthful; but fantastic' (p. xlii), full of historical detail and brilliant literary commentary.

Sackville-West's son Nigel Nicolson described Orlando as 'the longest and most charming love letter in literature'. But it is an ambivalent kind of love letter, as much ironic and critical as it is loving. The editors do an excellent job of tracing the ambiguities and complexities, giving us a very rich sense of this playful yet serious book. They are good, too, on how Woolf saw herself in relation to Sackville-West. Woolf was fascinated by aristocratic privilege even as in many ways she disdained it. She admired Sackville-West's social confidence, but it made her uneasy. She was a life-long supporter and modest activist in the Labour Party; her husband Leonard Woolf was a life-long Labour intellectual and activist. Together they shared a commitment to social justice which sat somewhat awkwardly with their friendship with Sackville-West and her husband Harold Nicolson.

Vita Sackville-West's wealth freed her to live an unconventional private life, and gave her the confidence to write, fluently and frequently. But to Woolf, the editors argue, such 'opulence blunted her creative edge'. Sackville-West's books sold well, and had a certain flair, but Woolf knew they weren't very good. Despite these reservations, Woolf drew extensively for Orlando on Sackville-West's Passenger to Teheran (1926) and even more on Knole and the Sackvilles (1922). Another source was Harold Nicolson's book Some People (1927); Woolf liked his mixture of fiction and fact and decided that she would write a book that was 'simultaneously novel, poem and biography' (p. xli).

Woolf corrected two sets of proofs of the novel. There are some significant differences between them. The editors use the British edition as copy-text and document all the variants in their textual notes. Orlando was printed for the Hogarth Press by R. & R. Clark of Edinburgh, in the same attractive font and dimensions as Passenger to Teheran: 'a demy octavo volume printed in 12 point Caslon Old Face' (p. lxi). It was published on 11 October 1928, priced at nine shillings; a limited, signed American edition appeared on 2 October, and...