ORLANDO AS A BOY

PENGUIN BOOKS

Orlando

Virginia Woolf is now recognized as a major twentieth-century

author, a great novelist and essayist and a key gure in literary
history as a feminist and a modernist Born in 1882, she was the
daughter of the editor and critic Leslie Stephen, and su ered a
traumatic adolescence after the deaths of her mother, in 1895, and
her step-sister Stella, in 1897, leaving her subject to breakdowns for
the rest of her life. Her father died in 1904 and two years later her
favourite brother Thoby died suddenly of typhoid. With her sister,
the painter Vanessa Bell, she was drawn into the company of writers
and artists such as Lytton Strachey and Roger Fry, later known as
the Bloomsbury Group. Among them she met Leonard Woolf, whom
she married in 1912, and together they founded the Hogarth Press
in 1917, which was to publish the work of T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster
and Katherine Mans eld as well as the earliest translations of Freud.
Woolf lived an energetic life among friends and family, reviewing
and writing, and dividing her time between London and the Sussex
Downs. In 1941, fearing another attack of mental illness, she
drowned herself.

Her rst novel, The Voyage Out, appeared in 1915, and she then
worked through the transitional Night and Day (1919) to the highly
experimental and impressionistic Jacob’s Room (1922). From then
on her ction became a series of brilliant and extraordinarily varied
experiments, each one searching for a fresh way of presenting the
relationship between individual lives and the forces of society and
history. She was particularly concerned with women’s experience,
not only in her novels but also in her essays and her two books of
feminist polemic, A Room of One’s Own (1929) and Three Guineas
(1938). Her major novels include Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the
Lighthouse (1927), the historical fantasy Orlando (1928), written for
Vita Sackville-West, the extraordinarily poetic vision of The Waves
(1931), the family saga of The Years (1937), and Between the Acts
(1941). All these are published by Penguin, as are her Diaries,
Volumes I-V, selections from her essays and short stories, and Flush
(1933), a reconstruction of the life of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s
spaniel.

Brenda Lyons is a doctoral candidate at Balliol College, Oxford,

where she is writing on ‘Platonic Allusions in Virginia Woolf’s
Fiction’. She holds an MA in English Literature from the University
of Massachusetts, Amherst, and has been an editor, writer and
educator since the publication of Brahmins and Bullyboys. G. Frank
Radway’s Boston Album (co-edited with Stephen Halpert, 1973).

Sandra M Gilbert is Professor of English at the University of

California and has published widely, including four volumes of
poetry and a book on D. H. Lawrence. With Susan Gubar she has co-
authored The Madwoman in the Attic and two volumes of No Man’s
Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century (Vol. 1:
The War of the Words and Vol. 2: Sex Change) and co-edited
Shakespeare’s Sisters and the Norton Anthology of Literature by
Women: The Tradition in English.

Julia Briggs is General Editor for the works of Virginia Woolf in

Penguin.
ORLANDO
A Biography

VIRGINIA WOOLF

EDITED BY BRENDA LYONS WITH

AN INTRODUCTION AND
NOTES BY SANDRA M. GILBERT

PENGUIN BOOKS

facsimile of the dust jacket of the rst edition.

PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
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Orlando rst published by The Hogarth Press 1928

This annotated edition published in Penguin Books 1993
Reprinted in Penguin Classics 2000
13

Introduction and notes copyright © Sandra M. Gilbert, 1993

Other editorial matter copyright © Brenda Lyons, 1993
All rights reserved

The moral right of the editors has been asserted

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it
shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated
without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in
which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being
imposed on the subsequent purchaser

ISBN-13: 978-0-141-18427-2
ISBN-10: 0-141-18427-2
 Contents

Preface 5

Chapter I 11

Chapter II 47

Chapter III 84

Chapter IV 108

Chapter V 157

Chapter VI 182
 Bibliographical Note

The following is a list of abbreviated titles used in this edition.

Diary: The Diary of Virginia Woolf, 5 vols., ed. Anne Olivier Bell
(Hogarth Press, 1977; Penguin Books, 1979).

Letters: The Letters of Virginia Woolf 6 vols., ed. Nigel Nicolson and
Joanne Trautmann (Hogarth Press, 1975–80).

Passionate Apprentice: A. Passionate Apprentice: The Early Journals,

1897–1909, ed. Mitchell A. Leaska (Hogarth Press, 1990).

Essays: The Essays of Virginia Woolf, 6 vols., ed. Andrew McNeillie

(Hogarth Press, 1986).

CE: Collected Essays, 4 vols., ed. Leonard Woolf (Chatto & Windus,
1966, 1967).

Moments of Being: Moments of Being: Unpublished Autobiographical

Writings of Virginia Woolf, ed. Jeanne Schulkind (Hogarth
Press, 1985).

Knole: Knole and the Sackvilles, Vita Sackville-West (Heinemann,

1922).

Letters of Vita: The Letters of Vita Sackville-West to Virginia Woolf,

ed. Louise DeSalvo and Mitchell A. Leaska (Hutchinson,
1984).
 Introduction
Orlando: Virginia Woolf’s Vita Nuova

In the autumn of 1927, Virginia Woolf was struggling to compose a

critical book on ‘Fiction, or some title to that e ect’. To the
Lighthouse, arguably her strongest novel, had been published a few
months earlier to considerable acclaim, but she was bored and
troubled by the work she was doing now. Suddenly she claimed to
have had a surge of inspiration. As she told the story in a letter of 9
October 1927 to the aristocratic novelist-poet Vita Sackville-West, a
close friend with whom she was more than half in love at this time:

Yesterday morning I was in despair… I couldn’t screw a word from me;

and at last dropped my head in my hands: dipped my pen in the ink, and
wrote these words, as if automatically, on a clean sheet: Orlando: A
Biography. No sooner had I done this than my body was ooded with
rapture and my brain with ideas. I wrote rapidly till 12… But listen;

suppose Orlando turns out to be Vita…1

Thus began Orlando, a witty and parodic ‘biography’ that Woolf was
later to describe as ‘a writer’s holiday’, even while she conceded the
compulsion she had felt to produce the book: ‘How extraordinarily
unwilled by me but potent in its own right… Orlando was! as if it
had shoved everything aside to come into existence.’2
In fact, although Woolf declared that she had embarked upon this
jeu d’esprit in a kind of trance, she had been meditating a project of
this sort for quite some time. In March 1927, when To the Lighthouse
was at press, she commented in her diary that she was considering
writing ‘a Defoe narrative for fun’. She had, she noted, ‘conceived a
whole fantasy to be called “The Jessamy Brides” ’ about two
women, ‘poor, solitary at the top of a house’ from which one could
see ‘anything (for this is all fantasy) the Tower Bridge, clouds,
aeroplanes’, adding that the work was

to be written… at the top of my speed… Satire is to be the main note –

satire & wildness… My own lyric vein is to be satirized. Everything
mocked… For the truth is I feel the need of an escapade after these serious
poetic experimental books whose form is always so closely considered. I

want to kick up my heels & be o .3

As the months wore on, she had re ned and transformed this idea,
remarking even before she wrote to Vita that

One of these days… I shall sketch here, like a grand historical picture, the
outlines of all my friends… It might be a most amusing book… Vita
should be Orlando, a young nobleman… & it should be truthful; but

fantastic.4

A week or two later, she decided that the work would be ‘a

biography beginning in the year 1500 & continuing to the present
day, called Orlando: Vita; only with a change about from one sex to
another.’5
At this point in her career, Woolf was at the height of her
impressive imaginative and intellectual powers. Born in 1882, to
Leslie Stephen, an eminent Victorian man of letters, and his
beautiful, lively second wife, Julia, she had been raised in, as she
put it, ‘a very communicative, literate, letter writing, visiting,
articulate, late-nineteenth-century world’.6 Even before her marriage
in 1912 to the socialist intellectual Leonard Woolf, she had begun to
move out of that world and into the centre of the radical and
rebellious circle of artists and writers that was to become known as
the ‘Bloomsbury Group’. Among other activities, she had studied
Greek (still at that time an unusual project for a young woman),
taught at a working-women’s college in South London, worked for
the women’s movement, and begun writing reviews for The Times
Literary Supplement.
Now, at forty- ve, Woolf was the author of ve novels, which had
become increasingly innovative in style, as well as a number of
important critical essays and sketches. With her husband, Leonard,
she owned and operated the Hogarth Press, a small but in uential
publishing house whose list included works by such key modernist
gures as T. S. Eliot and Katherine Mans eld, along with the English
translations of the complete works of Sigmund Freud. Never
arrogant – she had indeed had a number of nervous breakdowns
marked by severe depression and often possessed a distorted sense
of her own ‘failure’ in life – she was nevertheless, in her best
moments, serenely con dent of her own abilities and continually
determined to set herself new challenges. At the same time, having
spent more than a decade developing what she called the
‘tunnelling’ method by which she conveyed the interior lives of her
characters in such novels as Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, she
had every reason to want to take a ‘writer’s holiday’.
Metaphorically speaking, what better companion might she have
on such a holiday than the eccentric and charismatic Vita Sackville-
West? Where Woolf herself was the daughter of a ‘literate, letter
writing, visiting, articulate’ haut bourgeois family, Vita (short for
Victoria) was indubitably a scion of the aristocracy, a class with
which Woolf had always been ambivalently fascinated. Where,
despite her literary successes, Woolf continually worried about
money, Vita was at least putatively the heiress to a vast fortune:
although her claim to Knole, her ancestral estate, had involved a
complex lawsuit, the place itself was ancient, luxurious and
immense. While Woolf had married a socialist intellectual whom she
herself once de ned as a ‘penniless Jew’, Vita was married to a
representative of the British ‘establishment’ – the debonair diplomat
Harold Nicolson. Where Woolf was both childless and sexually
timid, Vita was both the mother of two sons and a notorious
‘Sapphist’, who made no e ort to conceal her attraction to, and
a airs with, women. (Indeed, where Leonard Woolf was
unswervingly monogamous, even uxorious, Harold Nicolson was as
amboyantly bisexual as his wife.)
In addition, though Woolf was (or felt she was) physically fragile
and odd-looking, Vita was sturdily beautiful, with a dark sensuality
that she had inherited (or so Woolf speculated) from a Spanish-
dancer grandmother named ‘Pepita de Oliva’, who was said to be
descended from gypsies. If Woolf was (at times) almost
neurasthenically intellectual and unworldly, Vita was not only a
woman of the world but also a woman of action and adventure, who
had brie y run o to Paris with a female lover, Violet Trefusis, just
ve years after her marriage to Nicolson. Despite her famous wit
and charm, Woolf was often anxious about her social self-
presentation – her clothes, her demeanour, even on some occasions
her manners – but Vita had the careless elegance and the o hand air
of command bred by generations of power. And last, but certainly
not least, where Woolf was a brilliant, driven and ambitious artist,
Vita was considerably less talented; although she was a successful
and proli c writer herself, she could not have been regarded as a
serious literary competitor.
That Vita frankly and urgently confessed to being ‘in love’ with
Woolf can only have multiplied her charms from the novelist’s point
of view. In a 1925 diary entry, the author-to-be of Orlando incisively
summarized the traits that drew her to this compellingly seductive
companion:

I like her & being with her, & the splendour – she shines in the grocer’s
shop in Sevenoaks with a candle lit radiance, stalking on legs like beech
trees, pink glowing, grape clustered, pearl hung. That is the secret of her
glamour, I suppose. Anyhow she found me incredibly dowdy, no woman
cared less for personal appearance – no one put on things in the way I did.
Yet so beautiful, &c. What is the e ect of all this on me? Very mixed.
There is her maturity & full breastedness: her being so much in full sail on
the high tides, where I am coasting down backwaters; her capacity I mean
to take the oor in any company, to represent her country, to visit
Chatsworth, to control silver, servants, chow dogs; her motherhood (but
 she is a little cold & o hand with her boys) her being in short (what I
have never been) a real woman. Then there is some voluptuousness about
her; the grapes are ripe; & not re ective. No. In brain & insight she is not
as highly organised as I am. But then she is aware of this, & so lavishes on
me the maternal protection which, for some reason, is what I have always

most wished from everyone.7

From girlhood on, Woolf had enjoyed writing mock ‘histories’ of

the lives of friends and relatives: in 1907 she produced a little work
called ‘Friendships Gallery’, a playful life of Violet Dickinson, an
older woman to whom she was much attached; and the following
year she composed ‘Reminiscences’, a memoir of her sister Vanessa
that was addressed to Vanessa’s children. But now, as a mature
writer, she had found so intriguing a subject that she was impelled
to develop the kind of informal, personal sketch she had earlier
dedicated to Violet and Vanessa into a full-length, professionally
expert (albeit fantastic and parodic) tribute to a person who
enthralled her, a tribute that Vita’s son Nigel Nicolson was later to
call ‘the longest and most charming love letter in literature’.

Beyond the personal charisma that Woolf had described with such
élan in her 1925 diary, what made Vita especially fascinating to this
would-be ‘biographer’ was the combination of erotic intensity and
sexual ambiguity that Woolf associated with Sapphism – that is,
with lesbianism. ‘These Sapphists love women; friendship is never
untinged with amorosity,’ she noted with interest.8 Nor was her
interest surprising, for the Bloomsbury Group, in which Woolf had
moved almost from her adolescence, had long been ‘radical in its
rejection of sexual taboos’, to quote her nephew and biographer
Quentin Bell.9
Indeed, as the critic Alex Zwerdling has put it, the

sexual permissiveness of the group really was extraordinary:

homosexuality and lesbianism not only practised but openly discussed;
adulterous liaisons becoming an accepted part of the family circle;
ménages à trots, à quatre, à cinq; and all this happening shortly after the

death of Queen Victoria, among people raised by the old rules.10

Woolf’s sister Vanessa, for instance, married Clive Bell but had a
long a air with the art historian Roger Fry and, after bearing Bell
two sons, had a daughter by the painter Duncan Grant, with whom
she settled into an amicable lifelong partnership.
Woolf’s friend Lytton Strachey, to whom she was brie y engaged
at one point, had numerous homosexual relationships, although he
too settled into a long living-arrangement, in his case with Dora
Carrington, a young woman who adored him, and her husband,
Ralph Partridge, whom he adored.
Although the young Virginia Stephen tended to be an observer
rather than a participant in these unconventional sexual
con gurations, her own feelings were never sti ed by convention.
As Quentin Bell observes, for example, she was clearly in love with
Violet Dickinson, to whom she wrote ‘passionate letters, enchanting,
amusing, embarrassing… from which one tries to conjure up a
picture of the recipient’.11 And, in fact, long before she had
conceived the Sapphic tale of ‘The Jessamy Brides’ which was to
metamorphose into Orlando, Woolf had depicted love between
women with special fervour in her novels. Rachel Vinrace, the
heroine of The Voyage Out (1915), develops a keen attachment to
her friend and mentor Helen Ambrose, while Katharine Hilbery, the
protagonist of Night and Day (1919), and the su ragist Mary Datchet
are drawn together, and the painter Lily Briscoe, a major character
in To the Lighthouse, is enthralled by Mrs Ramsay, the powerfully
maternal gure who dominates the work.
Most strikingly, Clarissa Dalloway, the eponymous heroine of Mrs.
Dalloway (1925), remembers the moment when her girlhood friend
Sally Seton kissed her on the lips as the supreme erotic experience
of her life and muses on her feelings for women in one of the most
explicitly sexual passages Woolf ever wrote:

… she could not resist sometimes yielding to the charm of a woman, not a
girl, of a woman confessing, as to her they often did, some scrape, some
folly… she did undoubtedly then feel what men felt. Only for a moment;
but it was enough. It was a sudden revelation, a tinge like a blush which
one tried to check and then, as it spread, one yielded to its expansion, and
rushed to the farthest verge and there quivered and felt the world come
closer, swollen with some astonishing signi cance, some pressure of
rapture, which split its thin skin and gushed and poured with an
extraordinary alleviation over the cracks and sores! Then, for that
moment, she had seen an illumination; a match burning in a crocus; an
inner meaning almost expressed. But the close withdrew; the hard

softened. It was over – the moment.12

‘She did undoubtedly then feel what men felt.’ Although this
remark seems casual enough, what underlay it – and what would
have given particular force to Woolf’s attraction to Sapphism as well
as to the fascination with transvestism and transsexualism so
centrally dramatized in Orlando – was the rise in the early years of
the century of the new enterprise of ‘sexology’, whose discourse
complemented and supplemented the equally new (and equally
sexualized) discourse of psychoanalysis that had now been taken up
by so many of the writer’s contemporaries. Where Victorian thinkers
had preached that ‘proper’ masculinity and femininity were inborn,
that sexuality was essentially immutable, the sexologists and their
disciples began to call attention to both the uidity and the arti ce
of gender.
Edward Carpenter, an open homosexual and the foremost British
prophet of this way of thinking, argued in the 1890s for what he
saw as the Utopian existence of a ‘third’ or ‘Intermediate Sex’, whom
he called ‘Urnings’ (from Urania, meaning heaven) because they
were able to achieve a kind of androgynous transcendence of the
narrow limits of heterosexuality. Speci cally relating his de nition
of these privileged beings to the growing movement for women’s
rights in which Woolf was herself involved, he declared in 1896 that

in late years (and since the arrival of the New Woman amongst us)…
there are some remarkable and (we think) indispensable types of
character, in whom there is such a union or balance of the feminine and
masculine qualities that these people become to a great extent the

interpreters of men and women to each other.13

And that Carpenter’s views would have been known to Woolf is
more than likely, because he had met and in uenced both E. M.
Forster and G. Lowes Dickinson, two important gures who were
closely associated with the Bloomsbury Group.
A theme similar to Carpenter’s was later sounded by the
playwright and Fabian socialist George Bernard Shaw, who also
connected changing de nitions of sexuality with the transformative
impact of the su rage movement. ‘People are still full of the old
idea that woman is a special creation,’ Shaw commented in 1927 –
just when Woolf was composing Orlando – but, he observed,

I am bound to say that of late years she has been working extremely hard
to eradicate that impression, and make one understand that a woman is
really only a man in petticoats, or if you like, that a man is a woman without

petticoats [emphasis mine].14

Thus, by 1933, Havelock Ellis, England’s foremost theorist of

‘sexology’ and a friend of both Carpenter’s and Shaw’s, could
succinctly summarize such new views of gender in his magisterial
book The Psychology of Sex, with the comment that

We may not know exactly what sex is, but we do know that it is mutable,
with the possibility of one sex being changed into the other sex, that its
frontiers are often uncertain, and that there are many stages between a

complete male and a complete female.15

Recently, of course, theorists of gender and sexuality have sought

to make careful distinctions between transvestism, transsexualism
and (male or female) homosexuality. Male transvestites are not
necessarily homosexuals. Clearly lesbians need not be transvestites.
And homosexuals of either sex are only infrequently transsexuals –
people who experience themselves as having been born into the
‘wrong’ sex. For Woolf’s generation, however, such distinctions were
less clear. Shortly after Orlando appeared, Radcly e Hall’s
controversial The Well of Loneliness (1928), an ostensibly realistic
portrait of the artist as a lesbian, characterized the ‘invert’ Stephen
Gordon, its female protagonist, as a man trapped in a woman’s
body.
An avowed lesbian herself, Hall regularly cross-dressed, was called
‘John’ by her intimates, and moved in the Sapphic salons of Paris
and London whose other habituees included such sexually rebellious
women as her aristocratic lover Una Troubridge and the painter
Romaine Brooks, as well as the writers Natalie Barney, Gertrude
Stein and Vita Sackville-West. Yet, despite Hall’s own apparently
unproblematic repudiation of what the poet Adrienne Rich has
lately called ‘compulsory heterosexuality’, the author of the
signi cantly entitled The Well of Loneliness gave a tragic cast to
Stephen Gordon’s story, describing her as ‘grotesque and splendid,
like some primitive thing conceived in a turbulent age of
transition’.16 The bleakness of Hall’s perspective was, in fact, very
di erent from the light-heartedness with which Woolf presented
Orlando’s change of sex.
After her male protagonist has become a woman, Woolf observes
insouciantly that ‘in every other respect, [she] remained precisely as
he had been’ (p. 98), implying that sexually de ned selves or roles
are merely costumes and thus readily interchangeable. ‘It was a
change in Orlando herself that dictated her choice of woman’s dress
and of a woman’s sex,’ she explains later, in a clari cation of this
point, noting that ‘Di erent though the sexes are, they intermix’ (p.
132). Indeed, not only is Orlando him/herself a multiply sexed
being who happily transcends gender because her ‘form combine[s]
in one the strength of a man and a woman’s grace’ (p. 98), but her
lover and her husband also appear to have available rich wardrobes
of multiform sexuality. After Orlando has become a woman, the
Archduchess Harriet of Scand-op-Boom becomes Archduke Harry;
he/she and Orlando act ‘the parts of man and woman for ten
minutes with great vigour and then [fall] into natural discourse’ (p.
126). Similarly, after she has wed the comic but magical sea captain
Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine, Orlando a ectionately accuses
her simpatico husband of being a woman, and he cheerfully accuses
her of being a man, for ‘it was to each… a revelation that a woman
could be as tolerant and free-spoken as a man, and a man as strange
and subtle as a woman’ (p. 179).
Despite the pain explored in The Well of Loneliness and the
pleasure represented in Orlando, the two works have in common an
assumption about gender, fostered by the theories of such
sexologists as Carpenter and Ellis, which radically contradicts
Sigmund Freud’s famous assertion that ‘Anatomy is destiny’. Hall
sees it as Stephen Gordon’s doom that her sexual destiny has been,
as it were, detached from her anatomy, while Woolf de nes
Orlando’s ability to choose her own sexual destiny as a triumph over
anatomy. But both at least implicitly protest against the notion that
social or erotic gender roles are inevitably determined by biological
sexuality. Thus, although Woolf thought The Well of Loneliness
merely a ‘meritorious dull book’,17 she o ered to testify on its behalf
when the work was seized and con scated by government censors.
Her defence of Hall’s project must have been impelled as much by a
sense of kinship with the rejection of ‘compulsory heterosexuality’
as it was by a commitment to freedom of speech.
Nor was Woolf alone among Bloomsbury intellectuals in her desire
to disentangle anatomy from destiny. Quentin Bell notes that just
before she was inspired by her romance with the Sapphic Vita
Sackville-West to begin producing her own fantastic portrait of the
artist as what we now call a transsexual, she had become fascinated
by sex change at a social event where gender uidity was virtually
thematic:

… early in September [1927], Maynard and Lydia Keynes gave a party at

Tilton. Jack… Sheppard enacted the part of an Italian prima donna, words
and music being supplied by a gramophone. Someone had brought a
newspaper cutting with them; it reproduced the photograph of a pretty
young woman who had become a man, and this for the rest of the evening

became Virginia’s main topic of conversation.18

When Woolf decided, therefore, that the ‘writer’s holiday’ devoted

to her friend Vita’s life as ‘Orlando, a young nobleman’ should be
simultaneously ‘truthful’ and ‘fantastic’, she was quite accurately
articulating a particular vision of gender as well as of history. For if
it was ‘fantastic’ to conceive of Vita living for 300 years, from the
age of Elizabeth to the ‘present day’, it was, in Woolf’s opinion,
perfectly ‘truthful’ to imagine Vita changing her sex as easily and
casually as she might change her clothes.

If Woolf’s romantic fascination with Vita and with Vita’s Sapphism

was one of the major forces that compelled her to write Orlando
with unprecedented speed and exhilaration, her long-standing
interest in history and biography was another crucially in uential
factor. Her father, Leslie Stephen, had become the rst editor of the
prestigious Dictionary of National Biography in the year she was born,
so she had been preoccupied with the personal but often ‘o cial’
genre of biography and its relationship to ‘o cial’ public
historiography from early in her career. She was largely educated at
home, moreover, and according to Quentin Bell, the studies her
father prescribed for her in her adolescence had included most of
the historical and biographical classics produced in the nineteenth
century, among them Macaulay’s History of England, Carlyle’s French
Revolution, Thomas Arnold’s History of Rome, Gibbon’s multi-
volumed Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and Froude’s Life of
Carlyle. That most of these books centred on the lives and works of
men, almost entirely omitting any discussion of the experiences and
achievements of women, must have soon become irritating to a
young proponent of women’s rights who was eventually to produce
two of our century’s major feminist treatises – A Room of One’s Own
(1929) and Three Guineas (1938).
Perhaps, therefore, as a gesture of rebellion against both paternal
and patriarchal authority, some of Virginia Stephen’s rst writings
took shape as biographies and histories which drew upon the form
in which her father and his associates worked, while not so subtly
satirizing the Lives of Great Men that were the subjects of his
dictionary, and which his friend Thomas Carlyle had, in Heroes and
Hero Worship, proclaimed the substance of history itself. ‘Friendships
Gallery’ and ‘Reminiscences’, her a ectionate tributes to Violet
Dickinson and Vanessa Bell, were in fact preceded by an attempted
‘History of Women’ (written in 1897 when she was just fteen and
unfortunately now lost) and later by a fanciful meditation on the
past entitled ‘The Journal of Mistress Joan Martyn’ (1906), in which
a woman historian named Rosamund Merridew discovers a set of
documents purporting to record the life and times of one Joan
Martyn, a fteenth-century diarist who is also a sort of prototype of
the mythical ‘Judith Shakespeare’ whose tragic and monitory tale
Woolf was to invent in A Room of One’s Own.
As Woolf matured, these early e orts to revise and reimagine a
past that had always been depicted as primarily masculine branched
out into three major biographical/historical projects that
consistently concerned her both as a ction-writer and as an
essayist. First, she frequently attempted to rewrite o cial history so
as to provide what the French feminist theorist Héléne Cixous has
named ‘the other history’ – the history not of ‘Great Men’ but of
women and of, in Woolf’s own phrase, ‘the obscure’, the history that
falls into the interstices between the chronicles of princes and kings
so that, when told, it ‘breaks the sequence’ of recorded time.
Second, she frequently sought to excavate and inspect family history
– to investigate, that is, the chronicles of the person and the
personal, the family romances, which stand behind both the
Carlylean ‘Lives of Great Men’ and the Wool an ‘Lives of the
Obscure’. Third, in such crucial texts as A Room of One’s Own and
Three Guineas, she produced meditations on education which
simultaneously recounted her rejection of the ‘old’ history, her
dream of a ‘new’ history, and her desire for a reengendered
education – literally (from the Latin educere) a ‘leading into’ – in the
new.
Woolf was not, of course, alone in her disa ection with traditional
history. As early as 1818, her favourite novelist, Jane Austen, had
created in Northanger Abbey a naive young heroine named Catherine
Morland who voiced a discontent that would have been congenial to
the youthful Virginia Stephen. History, Catherine complained, ‘tells
me nothing that does not either vex or weary me. The quarrels of
popes and kings, with wars or pestilences, in every page; the men all
so good for nothing, and hardly any women at all – it is very
tiresome.’19 In seeking to remedy this problem, moreover, Woolf’s
own work signi cantly parallels (or in a few cases almost uncannily
foreshadows) the research done by a range of real women historians
in the early twentieth century, some of whose writings – for
instance, Eileen Power’s Medieval People (1924) – she would later
read, but some of whose scholarship – for example, Mary Beard’s
Woman as a Force in History (1946) – she would not live to know.
When the Bloomsbury novelist rst began to address the
‘tiresomeness’ of conventional male-dominated history, such
feminist projects were virtually non-existent, even in her circle of
radical intellectuals. Indeed, as late as 1921, the American historian
Arthur Schlesinger had observed that

If the silence of historians is taken to mean anything, it would appear that

one half of our population have been negligible factors in our country’s
history. Before accepting the truth of this assumption, the facts of our
history need to be raked over from a new point of view. It should not be
forgotten… that all of our great historians have been men and were likely
therefore to be in uenced by a sex interpretation of history all the more

potent because unconscious.20

Though she may never have encountered Schlesinger’s statement,

Woolf was to echo it shortly after completing Orlando: in A Room of
One’s Own she remarked acerbically that ‘It was certainly an odd
monster that one made up by reading the historians’ [views of
women] rst, and the poets’ afterwards – a worm winged like an
eagle; the spirit of life and beauty in a kitchen chopping up suet.’ To
remedy the situation, she suggested that the students of Newnham
and Girton ‘should re-write history’, for, she noted ironically, ‘it
often seems a little queer as it is, unreal, lop-sided’.21
Although she produced a number of essays on women’s past and
on female literary traditions that attempted just such re-writings,
Woolf’s most sustained attempts at historical revision paradoxically
took the form of novels. In her view, as she explained in the ‘novel-
essay’ The Pargiters, which was the germ of her late novel-history
The Years (1937), ‘it would be far easier to write history [than
ction but] that method of telling the truth seems to me so
elementary, and so clumsy, that I prefer, where truth is important,
to write ction.’22 And this was a preference to which, from the
start of her writing career, she had consistently clung.
Thus, as a history of the transformed and transforming self which
criticizes standard histories and biographies at the same time that it
proposes the possibility of an alternative life, Orlando is not an
unprecedented work in Woolf’s canon. In The Voyage Out, the
arrogant St John Hirst nds it impossible to imagine that Rachel
Vinrace has ‘reached the age of twenty-four without reading
Gibbon’. In Jacob’s Room (1922), the form of biography encloses an
absent subject – a mysterious young man ‘over whom’ we ‘hang
vibrating’. In To the Lighthouse, when ‘Time Passes’, major public
events are related only parenthetically while an unidenti ed
narrator describes the assaults of nature on the Ramsays’ summer
house, and then focuses on the restorative labours of two obscure
cleaning women. Throughout these books (and others) Woolf
persistently explored the mystifying relationship between the
ine able essence of human reality and the deceptive, usually
patriarchal, substance of written records. By the time she came to
compose her ‘love letter’ to Vita Sackville-West, therefore, she was
ready not only for what she called ‘an escapade’ but also for the
creation of what Leon Edel has seen as ‘a fully- edged theory of
biography’, formulated, now, not only in reaction to her father’s
ideas but perhaps also in response to the theories of such modernist
contemporaries as Lytton Strachey, the amboyant debunker of
Eminent Victorians, and Harold Nicolson, the author of a treatise on
biography that was to be published in 1928 by her own Hogarth
Press.23
In Edel’s view, it was in fact Strachey himself who helped spark
Woolf’s desire to write a novel in the form of a parodic biography.
Commenting on Mrs. Dalloway, Strachey proposed to Woolf that
perhaps she should write a book with a ‘wilder and more fantastic’
structure than anything she had heretofore attempted, a ‘framework
that admits of anything, like Tristram Shandy’.24 But the nature of
the history that Woolf did ‘take’ as both structure and subject was
far more subversive than anything Strachey had in mind. For while,
in such volumes as EminentVictorians and Queen Victoria, Strachey
did ridicule the pomposities of the late nineteenth century, he still
preserved the contours of traditional history and biography. Setting
himself against the patriotic proprieties of the Victorian
establishment, he almost always acquiesced in the subtler pieties of
the masculinist Cambridge to which he himself remained loyal.
Woolf, however, produced a new kind of record – an exuberant
account of a life which, though apparently lived on the edge of
patriarchal history, nevertheless appropriates and transforms that
history.
Just as Woolf’s paradoxical decision that Orlando should be ‘truthful
but fantastic’ accurately summarizes her vision of the gender
transformation at the heart of the book, the phrase also o ers an
appropriate description of the narrative/historical enterprise she
undertook as she embarked on this ‘writer’s holiday’. For the
Lord/Lady Orlando is a nobleperson whom we rst encounter as a
young man in the sixteenth century, follow through the courts of
Elizabeth I and Charles II to an ambassadorship in Turkey where he
becomes a she, meet again living the life of a literary lady aristocrat
in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England, and nally see when
she has become a prize-winning author in ‘the present moment’ of
aeroplanes and motor-cars. Certainly, in the free- ying sweep and
scope with which it wings over the gravities of history, this life goes
beyond even the fantastic, Shandyan parameters Strachey
prescribed. Yet at the same time, it is, as Woolf insisted, ‘truthful’ –
truthful because it is true to Woolf’s ongoing e ort to reimagine
history, and truthful because it is true to her developing vision of
the secret psychological realities that shape even the most liberated
woman’s life.
Like Vita Sackville-West – and like Virginia Woolf herself –
Orlando seems to have been born into a central and privileged
position in society. At the same time, like both Woolf and Vita,
he/she is always a kind of outsider, and even, from a conventional
point of view, mad (furioso), like his/her literary ancestor, Ariosto’s
Orlando Furioso.25 By rank a nobleman, he has ‘a liking for low
company, especially for that of lettered people’, and even when he is
more or less adopted by the great Queen Elizabeth, he has little
enthusiasm for the doings of the court. During the timeless time of
the Great Frost, when London seems to hang suspended on the ice of
an eternal moment, he falls in love with the androgynous Sasha, a
Russian Princess for whom he ‘want[s] another landscape and
another tongue’, a place and a language outside the public English
history that is forming all around him. When Sasha sails away in the
ood of time that suddenly breaks up the ice, Orlando retreats to his
country estate to become a writer, but even in the world of letters
he is still an outsider. Gulled and galled by the literary impresario
Nick Greene, he is haunted but mysti ed by the enigmatic face of
Shakespeare and feels that no battle in which his ancestors fought
was ‘half so arduous as this which he now undertook to win
immortality against the English language’ (p. 57).
Again, as the English ambassador to Constantinople and, then, the
ex-ambassadress living al fresco among a band of gypsies, Orlando
never quite ts in. In the rst case, he alarms the English by making
a disreputable marriage to one ‘Rosina Pepita’, and in the second,
she disturbs the gypsies by writing poems, admiring sunsets and
longing for her English manor house. Finally, when she returns to
England, the lady Orlando is always slightly out of step with the
march of time around her. In the eighteenth century, she dresses as
a man so that she can visit – and hear the tales told by – the
communities of fallen women who walk the London pavements. In
the nineteenth century, she marries a sea captain and produces
‘lachrymose blot[s]’ (p. 167) of poetry, but her husband is an
eccentric explorer, not a Victorian patriarch, and her writing of
sentimental verse is ‘much against her natural temperament’. In the
twentieth century, she nally wins a prize for her poem ‘The Oak
Tree’ but wires her husband a sardonically encoded comment on the
meaning of literary achievement: ‘ “Rattigan Glumphoboo”, which
summed it up precisely’ (p. 196). Always on the margins of history,
she nevertheless glimpses Elizabeth, Shakespeare, Charles II, Nell
Gwyn, Alexander Pope, the Carlyles and even, in the book’s rst
draft, one ‘Volumnia Fox’ – a pseudonym for none other than
Virginia Woolf.26 But her glance passes over these luminaries with
the luminous indi erence of, say, a lighthouse beam. Within sight of
shore, she is always o shore, at sea in the wilder waters of history.
Nevertheless, as Woolf depicts him/her, Orlando is history, if only
because the light of her mind is the lamp that lights up time for
Woolf’s readers, and her stately mansion, with its allegorically
resonant 365 bedrooms and 52 staircases, is the house whose
endurance-through-change is the metaphor that Woolf gives us for
human duration. Whether o shore or on the edge of time, Orlando’s
supposedly marginal perspective, a perspective both Stephen and
Strachey might have excluded or ignored, becomes the central point
of view from which we must view the world as we try to come to
terms with the terms of history. In fact, as Woolf ranges over them –
obliquely envisioning them, slyly appropriating them, subversively
revising them – the terms of history become Orlando’s terms, and
nally even history itself becomes Orlando’s story, the tale of a body
now male, now female, which embodies that thread of alternative
truth Woolf was to call, in A Room of One’s Own, ‘the common life
which is the real life’ as opposed to ‘the little separate lives… we
live as individuals’.27
Thus, the psychosexual development of this parentless creature
(for Woolf never really introduces Orlando’s parents into her
‘biography’) constitutes a novel narrative indeed, for it is
generalized, parodied and ultimately transcended in the course of
Orlando’s fantastic intersections with history. Simultaneously
rede ning and questioning conventional periodization, the so-called
Elizabethan period recapitulates Orlando’s childhood and pre-
adolescence, with a timeless pre-Oedipal frost and an Oedipal ood
exaggerating and mocking the meaning of ‘growing up’. Similarly,
the seventeenth century, with its sex change, o ers Orlando a new
kind of adolescence, comically marking a moment of sexual
transformation and self-realization, while the eighteenth century
represents her ostensible (that is, what should be her) ‘young
ladyhood’. Again, the nineteenth century reproduces her bemused
confrontation with the exigencies of patriarchally de ned female
maturity (wedlock, maternity); and the twentieth century, with its
adumbration of an apocalyptic ‘new world’, re ects a mature
‘moment of being’, a liberating encounter with ‘the Captain self, the
Key self, which amalgamates and controls them all’ (p. 214).
In this uncanny con ation of the personal and the political, both
the processions of ‘King following King’ that make up o cial history
and the permutations of ‘the lives of the obscure’ that constitute the
‘other history’ appear, to use a phrase of Wallace Stevens’s ‘more
truly and more strange’. And speci cally, the history Woolf herself
had always de ned as ‘masculine’ here becomes ‘feminine’, too –
becomes, indeed, what the writer had heretofore implicitly de ned
as a contradiction in terms: a public history of the private woman –
as Orlando, returning at last from Turkey to reclaim her English
inheritance, becomes England’s gurative land-lady: the Lady Or-
land-o, Ur-land-o, Her-land-o.
That Orlando did begin as, and at base really is, a fantasy
biography/family history of a particular woman Virginia Woolf
loved is certainly also relevant here, not just because the novelist
wanted to atter and immortalize her friend, not just because that
friend was the wife of the theorist of biography Harold Nicolson, but
also because her commonly used nickname, Vita, means ‘life’, so
that the Vita Nuova Woolf devised for her fancifully suggests the
New Life that is the Life of the New Woman. Therefore, just as many
of the illustrations scattered throughout the book are pictures of
Vita herself or of her Sackville ancestors, many details of the plot
re ect signi cant details of Vita’s actual biography: her early
impassioned a air with Violet Trefusis (who here becomes the
Russian Sasha because Vita called her ‘Lushka’); her Spanish
grandmother (here, as in real life, ‘Rosina Pepita’); her courtship by
the foolish aristocrat Lord Lascelles (here the Duke/Duchess of
Scand-op-Boom); her travels in the East (here the Turkish episode):
her transvestism (here the eighteenth-century escapades); her
winning of the Hawthornden Prize for ‘The Land’ (here the winning
of the ‘Burdett Coutts Prize’ for ‘The Oak Tree’); her legal ght for
her ancestral property (here, as in real life, her Great Law Suit); her
marriage to the supportive bisexual Harold Nicolson (here called
Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine); and so forth.28
Equally important, Woolf’s fantastic transformations of these
details function to empower Vita. Thus this ctional Vita Nuova
grants her not just the one ‘life and a lover’ she asks for as Orlando
but many lives and many lovers. Thus, too, because Vita had grown
up feeling like a boy – even, during the height of her a air with
Violet Trefusis, posing as a wounded soldier named ‘Julian’ – and
haunted by anxiety about her ‘dual’ sexuality, Woolf assures her
that, yes, if she felt like a boy she was a boy. In fact, as if
responding to the hope Vita expressed in her (then unpublished)
autobiography that ‘as centuries go on… the sexes [will] become
more nearly merged on account of their increasing resemblances’,29
Woolf suggests in her simultaneous revision of history and sexuality
that centuries have indeed gone on and the sexes have merged, or
were never wholly separated – for ‘Di erent though the sexes are,
they intermix’ (p. 132). Thus, nally, where Vita was ultimately
barred from inheriting Knole, the Sackville estate, because of her
sex, Woolf grants her perpetual possession of this house so that at
last the dispossessed man/woman has not one but 365 rooms of her
own – a gure whose symbolic cast, even if based on the
extravagant reality of Knole, implies that he/she has inherited not
just a place in time but time itself.30
As a ‘theory of biography’, then, Orlando is also both a comment
on history and a meditation on time. To begin with, in her role as a
sort of metabiographer – a writer who both deploys and criticizes
the form in which she is working – Woolf wittily parodies the
intrusive and often absurd speculations of the scholar who presumes
to know the ‘truth’ about the ‘life’ and ‘self’ of his subject. Each of
us, she argues, as she endows Orlando with a host of costumes and
careers, has many ‘lives’ and many ‘selves’. Nor can they ever, in
their multiplicity, be properly understood by the voyeuristic
researcher. In relegating some of the major turning points of
Orlando’s history (for instance, her sex change, some of her
romances, the birth of her son, and even her completion of ‘The Oak
Tree’) to o stage scenes, Woolf simultaneously mocks the feigned
puritanism of biographers who shudder at scandals even while they
recount them and emphasizes the singularity, opacity and privacy –
indeed, the unknowability (at least to others) – of major personal
‘events’.
Just as importantly, in resisting the usual de nitions of a ‘lifetime’
(threescore and ten), Woolf points out that an individual’s own
perception of duration, as well as her or his sense of the varieties of
her/his emotional and intellectual experience, may be far more
dramatic than we ordinarily suppose. From adolescence to
adulthood, one may undergo personal metamorphoses as radical as
the public changes associated with the transformation of the fertile
and unruly ‘Elizabethan period’ into the tidily rational ‘eighteenth
century’ or the stickily sentimental ‘Victorian period’. And one may
feel, as ‘time passes’, that the gulf between one’s adolescence and
one’s adulthood is so vast that it ought to be measured not in what
we call ‘years’ but in what we term ‘centuries’.
Conversely, by arbitrarily associating traditionally de ned
historical ‘periods’ with the life of a single individual, Woolf
proposes that our de nitions of historical moments – the
‘Elizabethan’, the ‘Romantic’, the ‘Victorian’, the ‘modern’ – may be
equally arbitrary. If Orlando, as a kind of paradigmatic spirit of
English letters, is still persistently him/herself, single yet multiple,
various yet the same throughout these apparent metamorphoses of
English society, perhaps historical ‘changes’ themselves are not as
easily explicable or describable as we have been taught. Certainly
the hilarious rhetoric that Woolf adopts (as her role of
biographer/historian heralds each new ‘age’) de ates the
pretensions of writers who imply that the complexities of the past
can be interpreted through simplistic labels and categories.31
The funniest and best-known passage of such rhetoric is probably
the one in which, while Orlando gazes at the ‘serene and orderly’
prospect of eighteenth-century London, remembering the ‘tortuous
Elizabethan highways’, her parodic biographer suddenly describes a
‘turbulent welter of cloud’ gathering over the city at the stroke of
midnight and proclaims that now ‘All was darkness; all was doubt;
all was confusion. The Eighteenth century was over; the Nineteenth
century had begun’ (p. 156). To be sure, Woolf is succinctly and
metaphorically summarizing here the di erence between the ‘spirit’
of one ‘age’ and the ‘spirit’ of another, but the abruptness and
absurdity of the change she depicts puts the very idea of historical
‘transition’ in question. How and why the ‘hypothetical orderliness’
of the eighteenth century gave way to the supposed ‘cloudiness’ of
the nineteenth are more di cult questions than most chroniclers are
willing to concede.
Finally, Woolf shows, time itself – the material with which both
biographers and historians must inevitably grapple – is far more
mysterious than the average scholar would like to admit. Is time
what we experience or is it what we are told we experience? Do we,
in other words, live primarily by personal internal clocks or are we
really governed by an abstract, culturally imposed chronology?
These are questions Woolf had already addressed in a number of
works. In Mrs. Dalloway, for instance, public, o cial time is
represented by ‘Big Ben… with his majesty laying down the law, so
solemn, so just’, while what we might call private, experiential time
is symbolized by ‘the other clock, the clock which always struck two
minutes after Big Ben’ and which ‘came shu ing in with its lap full
of odds and ends… all sorts of little things… ooding and lapping
and dancing in on the wake of that solemn stroke’.32 And as we
have seen, in To the Lighthouse the culturally constructed time by
which history is usually measured – the chronicler’s time of births,
deaths and wars – is so engulfed by a sort of undi erentiated
‘natural’ time that major events are related in parenthetical
statements while the passage of ten years appears merely to occupy
a single night.
As a meditation on comparable questions about temporality,
however, Orlando is a good deal more radical than either of these
precursor texts. Obviously, the elasticity of the medium through
which the book’s protagonist moves is metaphysically crucial: on
the one hand, half of Orlando’s life/time expands to include ve
centuries of English social and cultural history; on the other hand,
ve centuries of English history shrink, as it were, to half the span
of this magical being’s life/time. But in addition, Woolf
intermittently comments not just on the arbitrariness of the ‘ages’
into which historical time has been organized by assorted historians,
but also on the arbitrariness of temporal units themselves. At one
point, for example, her narrator ridicules the calendar, which, as she
dryly observes, has no meaning in and of itself unless a human
signi cance is imported into it:

It was now November. After November, comes December. Then January,

February, March, and April. After April comes May. June, July, August
follow. Next is September. Then October, and so, behold, here we are back
at November again, with a whole year accomplished.

This method of writing biography, though it has its merits, is a little

bare, perhaps… (p. 184)

At another point, though, Woolf celebrates the centrality that the

calendar – and the clock – can assume when their abstract
signi cation coincides with the fullness of human experience.
Achieving a sort of Joycean epiphany in the twentieth century,
Orlando notices that
 the immensely long tunnel in which she seemed to have been travelling
for hundreds of years widened; the light poured in; her thoughts became
mysteriously tightened… she could hear every whisper and crackle in the
room so that the clock ticking on the mantelpiece beat like a hammer.
And so for some seconds the light went on becoming brighter and
brighter, and she saw everything more and more clearly and the clock
ticked louder and louder until there was a terri c explosion right in her
ear. Orlando leapt as if she had been violently struck on the head. Ten
times she was struck. In fact it was ten o’clock in the morning. It was the
eleventh of October. It was 1928. It was the present moment.

No one need wonder that Orlando started, pressed her hand to her
heart, and turned pale. For what more terrifying revelation can there be
than that it is the present moment? That we survive the shock at all is
only possible because the past shelters us on one side and the future on
another. (p. 206)

Hyperbolical though it is, this passage summarizes the radiant

intensity of the temporal experience – the ‘moment of being’, to use
Woolf’s own phrase – that this writer continually sought to capture
in her complex role as revisionary biographer/historian/novelist and
that, in Orlando, she triumphantly bestowed upon Vita Sackville-
West.

By the time Woolf nished Orlando, she had started to have doubts
about this novel which had begun with such compelling exuberance
as a ‘writer’s holiday’. ‘It may fall between stools, be too long for a
joke, & too frivolous for a serious book,’ she worried on 22 March
1928, and a month later she dismissed the work as ‘a freak’.33 To
her surprise, though, her rst ‘reviewer’ – Leonard Woolf, to whom
she regularly submitted all her manuscripts for comment as soon as
she felt they had been properly completed – took the book ‘more
seriously than [she] had expected’. He ‘Thinks it in some ways
better than The Lighthouse’, she noted in her diary on 31 May –
‘about more interesting things, & with more attachment to life, &
larger… He says it is very original.’34
Nor was Leonard Woolf eccentric among the novel’s early readers,
for in his wife’s own words, ‘The reception [of Orlando] surpassed
expectations’,35 in newspapers and magazines on both sides of the
Atlantic. Writing for the New York Herald Tribune, the feminist
novelist and essayist Rebecca West de ned the work as ‘a poetic
masterpiece of the rst rank’,36 an encomium which left Woolf
feeling ‘a little sheepish and silly’, while other, equally enthusiastic
critics praised Woolf’s ‘swift and sparkling prose’, her ‘delicious’
fantasy, her ‘exquisite’ poetry, and her ‘wit that plays like summer
lightning’. ‘Never, perhaps, has Mrs Woolf written with more verve:
certainly she has never imagined more boldly,’ pronounced The
Times Literary Supplement. And though pre-publication orders for the
book had been disheartening because, as Woolf explained to herself
in her diary, ‘No one wants biography’37 – not even, evidently, mock
biography – post-publication sales were the strongest Woolf had
ever had. ‘L. has just been in to consult about a 3rd edition of
Orlando,’ she noted in December 1928, adding that ‘we have sold
over 6,000 copies; & sales are still amazingly brisk –150 today for
instance; most days between 50 & 60; always to my surprise.’ In
fact, the success of Woolf’s literary ‘escapade’ marked a turning
point in her professional career. At last, she was able to decide, ‘my
room is secure. For the rst time since I married… I have been
spending money.’38
In the last few decades, however, a number of Woolf scholars and
critics have tended to value Orlando less highly than its early
readers did. Quentin Bell, for example, damns the work with faint
praise as ‘easy, amusing, and straightforward in its narrative’.
Although he concedes that ‘of all Virginia’s novels [this is] the one
that comes nearest to sexual, or rather to homosexual, feeling,’ he
characterizes its protagonist as ‘near… to the glamorous creations of
the novelette’.39 Adopting a similar tone, Alex Zwerdling
dismissively observes that in Orlando ‘such serious Wool an themes
as androgyny, the passage of time, and artistic dedication are rather
archly guyed’, while Jane Marcus curtly remarks that ‘more than
“kind explanation” is needed to see in it a modern myth of historical
development, what Rebecca West called the “high fountain” of
genius’, and most recently John Batchelor judges it ‘not… a major
work’ but rather ‘an experiment with a negative result’.40 And
indeed, despite the encomia of reviewers, Woolf herself had by
November 1929 scornfully described the book as not just a ‘freak’
but, worse, ‘mere child’s play’.41
Yet Woolf’s initial sense of Orlando as ‘extraordinarily unwilled’
but ‘potent in its own right… as if it shoved everything aside to
come into existence’ should not be discounted. For besides being a
happy ‘escapade’, a charming ‘love letter’, an exuberant analysis of
gender roles and a witty meditation on history, this work occupies a
particularly interesting and ‘potent’ position in Woolf’s oeuvre: she
began to contemplate Orlando shortly after she had completed To the
Lighthouse, the elegiac examination of the traditional upper middle
class Victorian family that was at least in part intended to exorcize
the ghosts of her own parents, her own past; and after nishing
Orlando she commented that ‘I want to write a history, say of
Newnham or the women’s movement, in the same vein’,42 then
turned almost immediately to her rst major feminist treatise, A
Room of One’s Own. In a sense, it can be argued, Orlando functions
as a crucial bridge between these two super cially very di erent
texts.
Woolf herself understood quite well the psychic signi cance that
To the Lighthouse had for her. As she initially conceived the novel,
she noted that ‘the centre is father’s character, sitting in a boat,
reciting We perished, each alone, while he crushes a dying
mackerel’,43 and after she had completed it she observed that ‘when
it was written, I ceased to be obsessed by my mother. I no longer
hear her voice; I do not see her.’44 In a study of Virginia Woolf and
the Fictions of Psychoanalysis, Elizabeth Abel has argued that ‘Woolf’s
two versions of the genesis of her text depict di erent parental
inspirations and distinct compositional processes that reproduce the
psychoanalytic disputes over the narrative priority of each parent.’45
Yet it may not be necessary to decide on the ‘narrative priority’ of
either parent if one sees that the core project of the novel is both an
exorcism of, and an elegy for, the sex roles of ‘father’ and ‘mother’
as they were prescribed during the years when Woolf was growing
up. ‘I suppose that I did for myself what psychoanalysts do for their
patients. I expressed some very long felt and deeply felt emotion.
And in expressing it I explained it and then laid it out to rest’,46
Woolf mused as she looked back on the composition of To the
Lighthouse, and certainly in writing this book she had ‘laid… to rest’
the ghosts of traditionally de ned parent gures who had haunted
her work from The Voyage Out onwards.
Orlando is in fact the rst Woolf novel in which a meditation on
the con gurations of the family as it is structured around the
stereotypical heterosexual couple does not in some sense dominate
the plot. Instead, this parodic but ultimately serious ‘biography’
takes as its starting point a character who may be said to have
evolved as much from Lily Briscoe, the determinedly single woman
artist of To the Lighthouse, as from Vita Sackville-West. What would
Lily’s life have been like, Orlando asks, if she had been set free to
rove through history and discover that what Mrs Ramsay considered
the ‘universal law’ of marriage (along with the sex roles on which
that law was founded) was as much an arti ce as the clothes she
wore or as her own painting of the ‘relation’ of ‘masses’? And what
would Lily’s life have become had all history been, for her, a
surprisingly free space in which one could easily and insouciantly be
woman or man? More, how would the engenderings of history
appear to such a radically new kind of being? Would the two
histories – the masculine chronicle solemnly produced by Big Ben
and the feminine record more di dently o ered by the ‘other clock’
– retain their separateness, remain divided?
 After she had explored these issues in Orlando, Woolf never again
returned to the kinds of representations of the traditional family
that had concerned her in her earlier books. A Room of One’s Own,
the work that immediately followed, was of course pioneering not
only in its e ort to excavate women’s history but in its advocacy of
a creative androgyny that recalls Edward Carpenter’s celebration of
a ‘third’ or ‘intermediate sex’, as well as in its imaginative
resurrection of the lost woman poet ‘Judith Shakespeare’. The Waves
(1931), which Woolf was planning even as she wrote Orlando and
began composing A Room of One’s Own, focused on six speakers
(three women and three men) whose family backgrounds are so
blurred that one might almost think each had been
parthenogenetically produced. And although in her last two novels,
The Years and Between the Acts, Woolf did return to a scrutiny of
family dynamics, she there approaches the history as well as the
problems and pleasures of ‘compulsory heterosexuality’ even more
sceptically and sardonically than she had before Orlando had
‘shoved everything aside to come into existence’.
At the same time, however, all these works ask a question that was
implicit in the revisionary history, the speculations on time past and
time present, that so occupied the creator of a fantastic
hero/heroine who lives through 500 years of cultural change. If
history can be reimagined and sex roles reconstituted through such
a reimagining, what might be the future towards which a newly
conceived past and present would lead? This was a topic on which
Woolf had also brooded throughout her career, beginning in the
early ‘Journal of Mistress Joan Martyn’, whose fteenth-century
diarist confesses that each morning ‘with my cheek leant upon the
window pane I like to fancy that I am pressing as closely as can be
upon the massy wall of time, which is for ever lifting & pulling &
letting new spaces of life in upon us.’47 Even at the end of her
writing life, as Alex Zwerdling has reminded us, Woolf was still
addressing this question. ‘The outline for Reading at Random, the
cultural history she left un nished at the time of her death,’ he
notes, ‘is reasonably familiar and straightforward from the Middle
Ages through the nineteenth century. But then comes the injunction
“Skip present day. A Chapter on the future”.’ Yet as he also
observes, ‘What eluded her was any understanding of how the
present could conceivably lead to the future she imagined’ – a
future, I might add, in which the liberation symbolized by the lively
shape-shiftings of Orlando and the reborn genius of ‘Judith
Shakespeare’ would be not only literarily but literally possible.48
Perhaps, however, it was through the intensity of the highly
metaphorical, lyrical, even incantatory language with which Orlando
concludes that Woolf did begin to imagine at least the inception of a
future that would be radically di erent from the past she had so
yearningly revised. Certainly as her record of a changed and
changing history mounts to an almost erotic climax on ‘Thursday,
the eleventh of October, Nineteen hundred and Twenty Eight’, she
o ers us – not just comically but seriously – a vision of
transformative promise that amounts to a sort of annunciation, an
impregnation of ‘reality’ by the forces of ‘fantasy’. Imperiously
invoking her husband while stationing herself beside the totemic
natural object that has been her aesthetic subject for centuries (‘
“Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine!” she cried, standing by the oak
tree’), Orlando bares ‘her breast to the moon… so that her pearls
glowed like the eggs of some vast moon-spider’ (p. 227). And as she
does so, she sets in motion a ‘moment of being’ that is also a
moment of mysterious change.
Below her, Orlando sees what is guratively speaking ‘the great
house’ of the past, where all is ‘lit as for the coming of a dead
Queen’. Above her, the ‘ ne sea captain’ Shelmerdine hovers,
‘coming nearer and nearer’ in an aeroplane. And then, in an allusion
to the annunciatory gesture – the epiphany of dove or swan –
through which the supernatural intervenes in human a airs, ‘a
single wild bird’ springs up over Shelmerdine’s head. Together,
Woolf implies, the past of a dead queen and the present of October
1928, the culture of house and aeroplane and the nature of moon
and ‘moon-eggs’, the sea of Shelmerdine the explorer and the earth
of Orlando the land lady, all incarnated in the revisionary love of a
‘womanly’ man and a ‘manly’ woman, may conspire to conceive an
‘unwilled’ but ‘potent’ vita nuova.

Sandra M. Gilbert 1992

NOTES

1. Letter to Vita Sackville-West, 9 Oct. 1927, Letters, III, pp. 428–9.

2. Diary, III, 20 Dec. 1927, p. 168.
 3. ibid., 14 March 1927, p. 131.
4. ibid., 20 Sept. 1927, p. 157.
5. ibid., 5 Oct. 1927, p. 161.
6. Moments of Being, p. 73.
7. Diary, III, 21 Dec. 1925, p. 52.
8. ibid.
9. Quentin Bell, Bloomsbury (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1973, p.
42).
10. Alex Zwerdling, Virginia Woolf and the Real World (University of
California Press, 1986, p. 168).
11. Quentin Bell, Virginia Woolf: A Biography, I (Hogarth Press,
1972, p. 83).
12. Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (1925; Penguin Books, 1992, pp.
34–5).
13. Edward Carpenter, Love’s Coming of Age (1896; Mitchell
Kennerley, 1911, pp. 120–21).
14. George Bernard Shaw, ‘Woman-Man in Petticoats’ in Platform
and Pulpit, ed. Dan H. Laurence (Hill and Wang, 1961, p. 174).
15. Havelock Ellis, The Psychology of Sex (Ray Long and Richard R.
Smith, 1933, p. 225).
16. Adrienne Rich, ‘Compulsory Heterosexuality and the Lesbian
Continuum’ in Blood, Bread and Poetry: Selected Prose 1979–1985
(W. W. Norton, 1986, pp. 23–75); Radcly e Hall, The Well of
Loneliness (1928; Avon, 1981, p. 52).
17. Diary, III, 31 Aug. 1928, p. 193.
18. Bell, Virginia Woolf, II, p. 132.
19. Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey (1818; Penguin Books, 1972, p.
123).
20. Arthur Schlesinger, ‘The Role of Women in American History’ in
New Viewpoints in American History (Macmillan, 1921, p. 126).
21. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (1928; Penguin Books,
1945, PP. 45, 47).
22. Virginia Woolf, The Pargiters, ed. Mitchell A. Leaska (Hogarth
Press, 1978, p. 9).
23. Leon Edel, Literary Biography (1959; Indiana University Press,
1973, p. 139).
24. ibid., p. 138.
25. On Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso as a major precursor text for
Orlando, see Beverley Ann Schlack, Continuing Presences: Virginia
Woolf’s Use of Literary Allusion (Pennsylvania State University
Press, 1979, pp. 80–83). For a discussion of the comparable
relevance of the Orlando/Rosalind plot in Shakespeare’s As You
Like It, see Joanne Trautmann, The Jessamy Brides: The Friendship
of Virginia Woolf and V. Sackville-West (Pennsylvania State
University Studies, No. 36, 1973, P. 41).
26. See ‘Orlando: An Edition of the Manuscript’, ed. Madeline
Moore, in Twentieth Century Literature (No. 25, 1979, pp. 337–9).
27. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (1928; Penguin Books,
1945, p. 112).
28. For a more detailed discussion of parallels between Vita’s life
and Orlando’s, see Schlack, op. cit., and Trautmann, op. cit.
29. Nigel Nicolson, Portrait of a Marriage (Weidenfeld and Nicolson,
1973, p. 107).
30. For Vita’s own history of Knole and its extravagances, see Vita
Sackville-West, Knole and the Sackvilles (Heinemann, 1922); see
also the notes to this edition.
31. For an interesting (though somewhat di erent) analysis of
Orlando as a ‘deconstruction’ of conventional biography and
history, see Rachel Bowlby, Virginia Woolf (Basil Blackwell,
1988, pp. 128–45).
32. Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (1925; Penguin Books, 1992, p.
140).
33. Diary, III, 22 March 1928, p. 177; 21 April 1928, p. 180.
34. ibid., 31 May 1928, p. 185.
35. ibid., 27 Oct. 1928, p. 200.
36. Rebecca West, New York Herald Tribune, 21 Oct. 1928, 11, pp. 1,
6.
37. Diary, III, 22 Sept. 1928, p. 198.
38. ibid., 18 Dec. 1928, p. 212.
39. Bell, Virginia Woolf, II, pp. 139–40, 118–19.
40. Zwerdling, op. cit., p. 56; Jane Marcus, ‘Introduction: Virginia
Woolf Aslant’ in Virginia Woolf: A Feminist Slant (University of
Nebraska Press, 1983, p. 2); John Batchelor, Virginia Woolf: The
Major Novels (CUP, 1991, pp. 16, 18).
41. Diary, III, 5 Nov. 1929, p. 264.
42. ibid., 7 Nov. 1928, p. 203.
43. ibid., 14 May 1925, pp. 18–19.
44. Moments of Being, p. 90.
45. Elizabeth Abel, Virginia Woolf and the Fictions of Psychoanalysis
(University of Chicago Press, 1989, p. 45).
46. Moments of Being, p. 90.
47. Shorter Fiction, p. 48.
48. Zwerdling, op. cit., p. 327.
Further Reading

PRIMARY

Vita Sackville-West
The Letters of Vita Sackville-West to Virginia Woolf, ed. Louise
DeSalvo and Mitchell A. Leaska (Hutchinson, 1984).

Knole and the Sackvilles (Heinemann, 1922).

Virginia Woolf
The Diary of Virginia Woolf, 5 vols., ed. Anne Olivier Bell (Hogarth
Press, 1977; Penguin Books, 1979).

The Essays of Virginia Woolf, 6 vols., ed. Andrew McNeillie

(Hogarth Press, 1986).

The Letters of Virginia Woolf, 6 vols., ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne
Trautmann (Hogarth Press, 1975–80).

Moments of Being: Unpublished Autobiographical Writings of Virginia

Woolf, ed. Jeanne Schulkind (1975; 2nd edn, Hogarth Press,
1985).

A Writer’s Diary, ed. Leonard Woolf (Hogarth Press, 1954).

SECONDARY

Susan Mary Alsop, Lady Sackville: A Biography (Weidenfeld and

Nicolson, 1978).
Frank Baldanza, ‘Orlando and the Sackvilles’ in PMLA (Proceedings
of the Modern Language Association) (No. 70, 1955, pp. 274–9).

Quentin Bell, Virginia Woolf: A Biography, 2 vols. (Hogarth Press,

1972).

Edward Bishop, A Virginia Woolf Chronology (Macmillan, 1989).

Louise DeSalvo, ‘Lighting the Cave: The Relationship between Vita

Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf in Signs: Journal of Women in
Culture and Society (Winter 1982, pp. 195–214).

_____‘A Note on the Orlando Tapestries at Knole House’ in Virginia

Miscellany (No. 13, 1979, pp. 3–4).

Leon Edel, Literary Biography, (1959; Indiana University Press,

1973, especially pp. 134–45).

Alice Fox, Virginia Woolf and the English Renaissance (OUP, 1990).

Victoria Glendinning, Vita: The Life of Vita Sackville-West

(Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1983).

David Bonnel Greene, ‘Orlando and the Sackvilles: Addendum’ in

PMLA (No. 71, 1956, pp. 268–9).

Ellen Hawkes, ‘Woolf’s Magical Garden of Women’ in New Feminist

Essays on Virginia Woolf, ed. Jane Marcus (University of Nebraska
Press, 1981, pp. 31–60).

Frederick Kellerman, ‘A New Key to Virginia Woolf’s Orlando’ in

English Studies (No. 59, 1978, pp. 138–50).
Sherron E. Knopp, ‘ “If I Saw You Would You Kiss Me?” Sapphism
and the Subversiveness of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando’ in PMLA
(No. 103, 1988, pp. 24–34).

Betty Kushen, ‘ “Dreams of Golden Domes”: Manic Fusion in

Virginia Woolf’s Orlando’ in Literature and Psychology (No. 29,
1979, PP. 53–66).

Jean O. Love, ‘Orlando and Its Genesis: Venturing and

Experimenting in Art, Love and Sex’ in Virginia Woolf:
Reevaluation and Continuity, ed. Ralph Freedman (University of
California Press, 1980, pp. 189–218).

Herbert Marder, Feminism and Art: A Study of Virginia Woolf

(University of Chicago Press, 1968).

Madeline Moore, ‘Orlando: An Edition of the Manuscript’ in

Twentieth Century Literature (No. 25, 1979, pp. 303–55).

Nigel Nicolson, Portrait of a Marriage (Weidenfeld and Nicolson,

1973).

Phyllis Rose, Woman of Letters: A Life of Virginia Woolf (OUP,

1978).

Sonya Rudiko , ‘How Many Lovers Had Virginia Woolf’ in the

Hudson Review (32, No. 4, 1979, pp. 540–66).

Beverly Ann Schlack, Continuing Presences: Virginia Woolf’s Use of

Literary Allusion (Pennsylvania State University Press, 1979).

Clifton Snider, ‘ “A Single Self”: A Jungian Interpretation of

Virginia Woolf’s Orlando’ in Modern Fiction Studies (No. 25, 1979,
 pp. 263–8).

Susan M. Squier, Virginia Woolf and London: The Sexual Politics of

the City (University of North Carolina Press, 1985).

_____‘Tradition and Revision in Woolf’s Orlando: Defoe and the

Jessamy Brides’ in Women’s Studies (1984).

Lytton Strachey, Elizabeth and Essex (Harcourt Brace, 1928).

Pamela Transue, ‘Orlando’, Chapter V of Virginia Woolf and the

Politics of Style (State University of New York Press, 1986, pp.
111–26).

Joanne Trautmann, The Jessamy Brides: The Friendship of Virginia

Woolf and Vita Sackville-West (Pennsylvania State University
Studies, No. 36, 1973).

Jean Moorcraft Wilson, Virginia Woolf: Life and London, a Biography

of Place (Cecil Woolf, 1987).

Leonard Woolf, An Autobiography, 2 vols. (Hogarth Press, 1967–9;

OUP, 1980).

Alex Zwerdling, Virginia Woolf and the Real World (University of

California Press, 1986).
 A Note on the Text

Woolf composed Orlando in a high state of exhilaration: ‘I have

written this book quicker than any: & it is all a joke; & yet gay &
quick reading I think: a writers holiday.’1 She began writing on 7 or
8 October 1927, and set down the last words shortly before 1 a.m.
on the night of 17 March 1928.2 She then revised it completely,
while retaining most of the narrative structure of the rst draft
(some details of the passages she later cut can be found in the notes
to this edition). A number of extracts from the original manuscript
have subsequently been published: the rst (a sequence from
Chapter V that begins with an apologetic note from Miss Christina
Rossetti) by Vita Sackville-West in an article for the Listener in 1955,
based on a radio programme.3 Transcripts of many passages that
di er in the manuscript from the printed text are provided by
Madeline Moore in her article on the subject.4 The manuscript
remains in perpetuity at Knole, the Sackville family estate at
Sevenoaks, Kent, as part of a bequest to the National Trust from
Vita’s sons, Ben and Nigel Nicolson.
Woolf sent Vita a special leather-bound copy of Orlando on the
morning of publication, 11 October 1928, the day on which the
novel’s last chapter takes place and Orlando arrives at the present
time; she also gave Vita the manuscript. The rst British edition of
Orlando was published by the Woolfs at the Hogarth Press, having
been printed in Edinburgh (by R. & R. Clark, Ltd), and the rst
American trade edition was published by Harcourt, Brace and Co.
on 18 October, though both this and the Hogarth volume were
preceded by a special limited edition, published on 2 October by
Crosby Gaige of New York who printed 861 copies and a further 15
on green paper.5 The American edition of Orlando di ers in a large
number of signi cant details from the British text. It was Woolf’s
practice to revise page-proofs for her British and American
publishers independently, with the result that there are more than
150 variant readings. A list of these is given in an appendix to this
volume. The page-proofs that Woolf corrected for Harcourt Brace
are at Smith College. Some pages of the corrected typescript survive
in private hands, several having been purchased by Frederick B.
Adams, an American railways director.6
Orlando sold exceptionally well – more than 8,000 copies in
Britain and more than 13,000 in the United States during its rst six
months. As Woolf’s biographer John Mepham points out, it was ‘the
turning point in her career from the point of view of sales’. During
her lifetime Orlando, along with Flush (1933, her spoof biography of
Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s cocker spaniel) and The Years (1937),
sold best, but this pattern changed after the war when these titles
were overtaken by the more serious modernism of Mrs. Dalloway
(1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927).7 Later editions of Orlando
include the Uniform Edition (1933, strictly not a new edition, since
it was a photo-o set reprint); the rst Penguin edition of 1942,
which identi ed Woolf as the daughter of Sir Leslie Stephen KCB
and the wife of Leonard Woolf, cost nine pence and ran to 75,000
copies; there was also an edition in the Signet Classic series (New
American Library) with an introduction by Elizabeth Bowen (1960).
Harcourt Brace then published in paperback for Harvest Books an
edition that, exceptionally, reproduced the original photographs;
more than 38,000 of these were printed between October 1973 and
December 1976.
This edition is based on the text of the rst English (Hogarth)
edition, with the following errors corrected (the rst reading is from
this Penguin edition, the second from the rst English edition).

102.34    blank verse poem  ]  blank version poem

131.26    seem to hint  ]  seems to hint

  218.6    strangers, but a little wary  ]  strangers, but a little weary

NOTES

1. Diary, III, 18 March 1928, p. 177.

2. See Letter to Vita Sackville-West, 9 Oct. 1927, Letters, III, pp.
428–9; and Diary, III, 5 and 22 Oct. 1927, p. 161. The MS ends
with the date ‘March 17th 1928’; see also Letter to Vita
Sackville-West, 20? March 1928, Letters, III, p. 474, and the diary
entry, ‘Orlando was nished yesterday as the clock struck one’,
Diary, III, 18 March 1928, p. 176 (confusingly repeated at the
entry for 22 March, p. 177).
3. V. Sackville-West, ‘Virginia Woolf and Orlando’ (Listener, 27
January 1955, PP. 157–8).
4. Madeline Moore, ‘Orlando: An Edition of the Manuscript’ in
Twentieth Century Literature (No. 25, 1979, pp. 303–55).
5. Bibliographical details are taken from B. J. Kirkpatrick, A
Bibliography of Virginia Woolf (3rd edn, OUP, 1980, pp. 34–8).
6. See note in Letters, V, p. 168.
7. John Mepham, Virginia Woolf: A Literary Life (Macmillan, 1991,
pp. 130–31).
 A Note on the Illustrations

Orlando is unique among Woolf’s novels in presenting itself to

readers as a biography, if parodically so:

I am writing Orlando half in a mock style very clear & plain, so that
people will understand every word. But the balance between truth &
fantasy must be careful. It is based on Vita, Violet Trefusis, Lord Lascelles,

Knole &c.1

In support of this claim the rst edition features eight illustrations,

plus a black and white portrait on the dust jacket which appears as
the frontispiece to this edition. The photograph is of a painting or
part of a painting of a gentleman in Elizabethan costume with a
large shield before him (on previous occasions Vanessa Bell had
designed and illustrated dust jackets for Woolf’s novels). The rst
edition notes that this portrait (which looks like a modern pastiche)
is reproduced by kind permission of the Worthing Art Gallery, but
nothing more is known about it.
Woolf began assembling the photographs for Orlando in October
1927; three of these were of Vita Sackville-West, while three others
were taken from portraits at Knole. Taking the pictures in order of
their appearance, the rst, which is also the frontispiece to the
original volume (‘Orlando as a Boy’), is the right-hand side of a
double portrait at Knole. Painted by Cornelius Nuie, it shows two
sons of Edward Sackville, fourth Earl of Dorset, as boys; the younger
one, the Honourable Edward Sackville, is depicted here. Vita had
also reproduced this picture in her book Knole and the Sackvilles
(1922). The second (‘The Russian Princess as a Child’) is a
photograph of Woolf’s niece Angelica Bell (daughter of Vanessa Bell
and Duncan Grant); it may be a collage, as the lower part of the
photograph appears painted. The third (‘The Archduchess Harriet’)
is Marcus Gheeraerts’ portrait of Mary Curzon, fourth Countess of
Dorset, then hanging in the parlour passage at Knole; while the
fourth (‘Orlando as Ambassador’), is from a pastel portrait of Lionel,
rst Duke of Dorset, by Rosalba Carriera, in the sitting room.2 The
fth (‘Orlando on her return to England’) is a studio photograph of
Vita, probably taken by Lenare. The sixth (‘Orlando about the year
1840’) seems to have been taken by Vanessa and Duncan on the
afternoon of 14 November 1927.3 The seventh (‘Marmaduke
Bonthrop Shelmerdine, Esquire’) is the painting of a young man c.
1820 by an unidenti ed artist – he bears some resemblance to the
young Harold Nicolson. Vita had bought it from a London dealer
and it now hangs at Sissinghurst.4 The eighth (‘Orlando at the
present time’) is a photograph of Vita at Long Barn taken by
Leonard Woolf, probably at the end of April 1928. Virginia wrote to
Vita: ‘It has now become essential to have a photograph of Orlando
in country clothes in a wood. If you have lms and a camera I
thought Leonard might take you.’5
In this edition the photographs have been placed as closely as
possible to their positions in the rst edition.
NOTES

1. Diary, III, 22 Oct. 1927, p. 162.

2. The use of these three Knole portraits later led the new Lord
Sackville to complain that they had been used without his
permission – in fact Vita had obtained her father’s permission
before his death; see Letters, III, p. 558.
3. See letters to Vita, 6 and 11 Nov. 1927, Letters, III, pp. 434–5.
Footnotes explain that three portraits of the Sackville family
were used in Orlando (the frontispiece and the third and fourth
pictures). A further footnote (p. 435) identi es the photograph of
Vita in a hat, shawl and check skirt (‘Orlando about the year
1840’) as the work of Vanessa and Duncan. The earlier
photograph of Vita in satin and pearls (‘Orlando on her return to
England’) was probably taken by Lenare, since Virginia wrote to
Vita, ‘Nessa wants to photograph you at 2, that is if she thinks
the Lenare too bad.’ It looks as if, in addition to the fancy-dress
‘1840’ picture, Vanessa and Duncan took some photographs of
Vita in the pink satin and pearls that were intended to suggest a
Lely portrait because in Madeline Moore’s book The Short Season
Between Two Silences (Unwin Hyman, 1984) there is a
photograph of a rather dishevelled Vita in pearls and satin,
captioned, ‘Vita… posing as a lily [Lely?] in Vanessa Bell’s
studio, 1928’. In Vita (p. 182), Victoria Glendinning quotes an
amusing account of one of these photographic sessions, though
 she later (p. 205) identi es the ‘1840’ portrait as the one taken
by Lenare, a view contradicted by the editors of the Letters.
4. See Letter to Vita, 17 April 1928, Letters, III, p. 484; and
footnote.
5. Letter to Vita, 27 April 1928, Letters, III, p. 488. This photograph
also appears in Letters of Vita. Two other versions, apparently
taken on the same occasion, appear in Vita (here credited to
Virginia, rather than Leonard) and in Nigel Nicolson’s Vita and
Harold: The Letters of Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson
1910–1962 (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1992).

Overleaf: facsimile of the frontispiece and title page of the rst

edition.
ORLANDO
A BIOGRAPHY
VIRGINIA WOOLF

Published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf at the Hogarth Press,

52 Tavistock Square, London, W.C. 1928
TO
V. SACKVILLE-WEST
 Preface

Many friends have helped me in writing this book. Some are dead
and so illustrious that I scarcely dare name them, yet no one can
read or write without being perpetually in the debt of Defoe, Sir
Thomas Browne, Sterne, Sir Walter Scott, Lord Macaulay, Emily
Brontë, De Quincey, and Walter Pater – to name the rst that come
to mind. Others are alive, and though perhaps as illustrious in their
own way, are less formidable for that very reason. I am specially
indebted to Mr. C. P. Sanger, without whose knowledge of the law
of real property this book could never have been written. Mr.
Sydney-Turner’s wide and peculiar erudition has saved me, I hope,
some lamentable blunders. I have had the advantage – how great I
alone can estimate – of Mr. Arthur Waley’s knowledge of Chinese.
Madame Lopokova (Mrs. J. M. Keynes) has been at hand to correct
my Russian. To the unrivalled sympathy and imagination of Mr.
Roger Fry I owe whatever understanding of the art of painting I may
possess. I have, I hope, pro ted in another department by the
singularly penetrating, if severe, criticism of my nephew Mr. Julian
Bell. Miss M. K. Snowdon’s indefatigable researches in the archives
of Harrogate and Cheltenham were none the less arduous for being
vain. Other friends have helped me in ways too various to specify. I
must content myself with naming Mr. Angus Davidson; Mrs.
Cartwright; Miss Janet Case; Lord Berners (whose knowledge of
Elizabethan music has proved invaluable); Mr. Francis Birrell; my
brother, Dr. Adrian Stephen; Mr. F. L. Lucas; Mr. and Mrs. Desmond
MacCarthy; that most inspiriting of critics, my brother-in-law, Mr.
Clive Bell; Mr. G. H. Rylands; Lady Colefax; Miss Nellie Boxall; Mr.
J. M. Keynes; Mr. Hugh Walpole; Miss Violet Dickinson; the Hon.
Edward Sackville West; Mr. and Mrs. St. John Hutchinson; Mr.
Duncan Grant; Mr. and Mrs. Stephen Tomlin; Mr. and Lady Ottoline
Morrell; my mother-in-law, Mrs. Sidney Woolf; Mr. Osbert Sitwell;
Madame Jacques Raverat; Colonel Cory Bell; Miss Valerie Taylor;
Mr. J. T. Sheppard; Mr. and Mrs. T. S. Eliot; Miss Ethel Sands; Miss
Nan Hudson; my nephew Mr. Quentin Bell (an old and valued
collaborator in ction); Mr. Raymond Mortimer; Lady Gerald
Wellesley; Mr. Lytton Strachey; the Viscountess Cecil; Miss Hope
Mirrlees; Mr. E. M. Forster; the Hon. Harold Nicolson; and my sister,
Vanessa Bell – but the list threatens to grow too long and is already
far too distinguished. For while it rouses in me memories of the
pleasantest kind it will inevitably wake expectations in the reader
which the book itself can only disappoint. Therefore I will conclude
by thanking the o cials of the British Museum and Record O ce
for their wonted courtesy; my niece Miss Angelica Bell, for a service
which none but she could have rendered; and my husband for the
patience with which he has invariably helped my researches and for
the profound historical knowledge to which these pages owe
whatever degree of accuracy they may attain. Finally, I would
thank, had I not lost his name and address, a gentleman in America,
who has generously and gratuitously corrected the punctuation, the
botany, the entomology, the geography, and the chronology of
previous works of mine and will, I hope, not spare his services on
the present occasion.
 CONTENTS

Bibliographical Note ix

Introduction xi

Further Reading xli

A Note on the Text xliv

A Note on the Illustrations xlvii

Orlando 1

Notes 233

Appendix 265
 Illustrations

1. Orlando as a Boy Frontispiece

2. The Russian Princess as a Child 35

3. The Archduchess Harriet 79

4. Orlando as Ambassador 87

5. Orlando on her return to England 111

6. Orlando about the year 1840 171

7. Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine, Esquire 185

8. Orlando at the present time 221

 Chapter I

He – for there could be no doubt of his sex, though the fashion of

the time did something to disguise it – was in the act of slicing at
the head of a Moor1 which swung from the rafters. It was the colour
of an old football, and more or less the shape of one, save for the
sunken cheeks and a strand or two of coarse, dry hair, like the hair
on a cocoanut. Orlando’s father, or perhaps his grandfather, had
struck it from the shoulders of a vast Pagan who had started up
under the moon in the barbarian elds of Africa; and now it swung,
gently, perpetually, in the breeze which never ceased blowing
through the attic rooms of the gigantic house of the lord who had
slain him.
Orlando’s fathers had ridden in elds of asphodel,2 and stony
elds, and elds watered by strange rivers, and they had struck
many heads of many colours o many shoulders, and brought them
back to hang from the rafters. So too would Orlando, he vowed. But
since he was sixteen only, and too young to ride with them in Africa
or France, he would steal away from his mother and the peacocks in
the garden and go to his attic room and there lunge and plunge and
slice the air with his blade. Sometimes he cut the cord so that the
skull bumped on the oor and he had to string it up again, fastening
it with some chivalry almost out of reach so that his enemy grinned
at him through shrunk, black lips triumphantly. The skull swung to
and fro, for the house, at the top of which he lived, was so vast that
there seemed trapped in it the wind itself, blowing this way,
blowing that way, winter and summer. The green arras with the
hunters on it moved perpetually. His fathers had been noble since
they had been at all. They came out of the northern mists wearing
coronets on their heads.3 Were not the bars of darkness in the room,
and the yellow pools which chequered the oor, made by the sun
falling through the stained glass of a vast coat of arms in the
window? Orlando stood now in the midst of the yellow body of an
heraldic leopard.4 When he put his hand on the window-sill to push
the window open, it was instantly coloured red, blue, and yellow
like a butter y’s wing. Thus, those who like symbols, and have a
turn for the deciphering of them, might observe that though the
shapely legs, the handsome body,5 and the well-set shoulders were
all of them decorated with various tints of heraldic light, Orlando’s
face, as he threw the window open, was lit solely by the sun itself. A
more candid, sullen face it would be impossible to nd. Happy the
mother who bears, happier still the biographer who records the life
of such a one! Never need she vex herself, nor he invoke the help of
novelist or poet. From deed to deed, from glory to glory, from o ce
to o ce he must go, his scribe following after, till they reach
whatever seat it may be that is the height of their desire. Orlando,
to look at, was cut out precisely for some such career. The red of the
cheeks was covered with peach down; the down on the lips was only
a little thicker than the down on the cheeks. The lips themselves
were short and slightly drawn back over teeth of an exquisite and
almond whiteness. Nothing disturbed the arrowy nose in its short,
tense ight; the hair was dark, the ears small, and tted closely to
the head. But, alas, that these catalogues of youthful beauty cannot
end without mentioning forehead and eyes. Alas, that people are
seldom born devoid of all three; for directly we glance at Orlando
standing by the window, we must admit that he had eyes like
drenched violets, so large that the water seemed to have brimmed in
them and widened them; and a brow like the swelling of a marble
dome pressed between the two blank medallions which were his
temples. Directly we glance at eyes and forehead, thus do we
rhapsodise. Directly we glance at eyes and forehead, we have to
admit a thousand disagreeables which it is the aim of every good
biographer to ignore. Sights disturbed him, like that of his mother, a
very beautiful lady in green walking out to feed the peacocks with
Twitchett, her maid, behind her; sights exalted him – the birds and
the trees; and made him in love with death – the evening sky, the
homing rooks; and so, mounting up the spiral stairway into his brain
– which was a roomy one – all these sights, and the garden sounds
too, the hammer beating, the wood chopping, began that riot and
confusion of the passions and emotions which every good
biographer detests. But to continue – Orlando slowly drew in his
head, sat down at the table, and, with the half-conscious air of one
doing what they do every day of their lives at this hour, took out a
writing book labelled ‘Aethelbert: A Tragedy in Five Acts’,6 and
dipped an old stained goose quill in the ink.
Soon he had covered ten pages and more with poetry. He was
uent, evidently, but he was abstract. Vice, Crime, Misery were the
personages of his drama; there were Kings and Queens of impossible
territories; horrid plots confounded them; noble sentiments su used
them; there was never a word said as he himself would have said it,
but all was turned with a uency and sweetness which, considering
his age – he was not yet seventeen – and that the sixteenth century
had still some years of its course to run, were remarkable enough.
At last, however, he came to a halt. He was describing, as all young
poets are for ever describing, nature, and in order to match the
shade of green precisely he looked (and here he showed more
audacity than most) at the thing itself, which happened to be a
laurel bush growing beneath the window. After that, of course, he
could write no more. Green in nature is one thing, green in
literature another. Nature and letters seem to have a natural
antipathy; bring them together and they tear each other to pieces.
The shade of green Orlando now saw spoilt his rhyme and split his
metre. Moreover, nature has tricks of her own. Once look out of a
window at bees among owers, at a yawning dog, at the sun setting,
once think ‘how many more suns shall I see set’, etc. etc. (the
thought is too well known to be worth writing out) and one drops
the pen, takes one’s cloak, strides out of the room, and catches one’s
foot on a painted chest as one does so. For Orlando was a tri e
clumsy.
He was careful to avoid meeting anyone. There was Stubbs, the
gardener,7 coming along the path. He hid behind a tree till he had
passed. He let himself out at a little gate in the garden wall. He
skirted all stables, kennels, breweries, carpenters’ shops, wash-
houses, places where they make tallow candles, kill oxen, forge
horse-shoes, stitch jerkins – for the house was a town8 ringing with
men at work at their various crafts – and gained the ferny path
leading uphill through the park unseen. There is perhaps a kinship
among qualities; one draws another along with it; and the
biographer should here call attention to the fact that this clumsiness
is often mated with a love of solitude. Having stumbled over a chest,
Orlando naturally loved solitary places, vast views, and to feel
himself for ever and ever and ever alone.
So, after a long silence, ‘I am alone’, he breathed at last, opening
his lips for the rst time in this record. He had walked very quickly
uphill through ferns and hawthorn bushes, startling deer and wild
birds, to a place crowned by a single oak tree.9 It was very high, so
high indeed that nineteen English counties could be seen beneath;
and on clear days thirty or perhaps forty, if the weather was very
ne. Sometimes one could see the English Channel, wave reiterating
upon wave. Rivers could be seen and pleasure boats gliding on
them; and galleons setting out to sea; and armadas with pu s of
smoke from which came the dull thud of cannon ring; and forts on
the coast; and castles among the meadows; and here a watch tower;
and there a fortress; and again some vast mansion like that of
Orlando’s father, massed like a town in the valley circled by walls.
To the east there were the spires of London and the smoke of the
city; and perhaps on the very sky line, when the wind was in the
right quarter, the craggy top and serrated edges of Snowdon10
herself showed mountainous among the clouds. For a moment
Orlando stood counting, gazing, recognising. That was his father’s
house; that his uncle’s. His aunt owned those three great turrets
among the trees there. The heath was theirs and the forest; the
pheasant and the deer, the fox, the badger, and the butter y.
He sighed profoundly, and ung himself – there was a passion in
his movements which deserves the word – on the earth at the foot of
the oak tree. He loved, beneath all this summer transiency, to feel
the earth’s spine beneath him; for such he took the hard root of the
oak tree to be; or, for image followed image, it was the back of a
great horse that he was riding; or the deck of a tumbling ship – it
was anything indeed, so long as it was hard, for he felt the need of
something which he could attach his oating heart to; the heart that
tugged at his side; the heart that seemed lled with spiced and
amorous gales every evening about this time when he walked out.
To the oak tree he tied it and as he lay there, gradually the utter in
and about him stilled itself; the little leaves hung, the deer stopped;
the pale summer clouds stayed; his limbs grew heavy on the ground;
and he lay so still that by degrees the deer stepped nearer and the
rooks wheeled round him and the swallows dipped and circled and
the dragon- ies shot past, as if all the fertility and amorous activity
of a summer’s evening were woven web-like about his body.
After an hour or so – the sun was rapidly sinking, the white clouds
had turned red, the hills were violet, the woods purple, the valleys
black – a trumpet sounded. Orlando leapt to his feet. The shrill
sound came from the valley. It came from a dark spot down there; a
spot compact and mapped out; a maze; a town, yet girt about with
walls; it came from the heart of his own great house in the valley,
which, dark before, even as he looked and the single trumpet
duplicated and reduplicated itself with other shriller sounds, lost its
darkness and became pierced with lights. Some were small hurrying
lights, as if servants dashed along corridors to answer summonses;
others were high and lustrous lights, as if they burnt in empty
banqueting-halls made ready to receive guests who had not come;
and others dipped and waved and sank and rose, as if held in the
hands of troops of serving men, bending, kneeling, rising, receiving,
guarding, and escorting with all dignity indoors a great Princess
alighting from her chariot. Coaches turned and wheeled in the
courtyard. Horses tossed their plumes. The Queen had come.
Orlando looked no more. He dashed downhill. He let himself in at
a wicket gate. He tore up the winding staircase. He reached his
room. He tossed his stockings to one side of the room, his jerkin to
the other. He dipped his head. He scoured his hands. He pared his
nger nails. With no more than six inches of looking-glass and a
pair of old candles to help him, he had thrust on crimson breeches,
lace collar, waistcoat of ta eta, and shoes with rosettes on them as
big as double dahlias in less than ten minutes by the stable clock. He
was ready. He was ushed. He was excited. But he was terribly late.
By short cuts known to him, he made his way now through the
vast congeries of rooms and staircases to the banqueting-hall, ve
acres distant on the other side of the house. But halfway there, in
the back quarters where the servants lived, he stopped. The door of
Mrs. Stewkley’s sitting-room stood open -she was gone, doubtless,
with all her keys to wait upon her mistress. But there, sitting at the
servants’ dinner table with a tankard beside him and paper in front
of him, sat a rather fat, rather shabby man, whose ru was a
thought dirty, and whose clothes were of hodden brown.11 He held
a pen in his hand, but he was not writing. He seemed in the act of
rolling some thought up and down, to and fro in his mind till it
gathered shape or momentum to his liking. His eyes, globed and
clouded like some green stone of curious texture, were xed. He did
not see Orlando. For all his hurry, Orlando stopped dead. Was this a
poet? Was he writing poetry? ‘Tell me’, he wanted to say,
‘everything in the whole world’ – for he had the wildest, most
absurd, extravagant ideas about poets and poetry – but how speak
to a man who does not see you? who sees ogres, satyrs, perhaps the
depths of the sea instead? So Orlando stood gazing while the man
turned his pen in his ngers, this way and that way; and gazed and
mused; and then, very quickly, wrote half-a-dozen lines and looked
up. Whereupon Orlando, overcome with shyness, darted o and
reached the banqueting-hall only just in time to sink upon his knees
and, hanging his head in confusion, to o er a bowl of rose water to
the great Queen herself.12
Such was his shyness that he saw no more of her than her ringed
hand in water; but it was enough. It was a memorable hand; a thin
hand with long ngers always curling as if round orb or sceptre; a
nervous, crabbed, sickly hand; a commanding hand, too; a hand that
had only to raise itself for a head to fall; a hand, he guessed,
attached to an old body that smelt like a cupboard in which furs are
kept in camphor; which body was yet caparisoned in all sorts of
brocades and gems; and held itself very upright though perhaps in
pain from sciatica; and never inched though strung together by a
thousand fears; and the Queen’s eyes were light yellow. All this he
felt as the great rings ashed in the water and then something
pressed his hair – which, perhaps, accounts for his seeing nothing
more likely to be of use to a historian. And in truth, his mind was
such a welter of opposites – of the night and the blazing candles, of
the shabby poet and the great Queen, of silent elds and the clatter
of serving men – that he could see nothing; or only a hand.
By the same showing, the Queen herself can have seen only a
head. But if it is possible from a hand to deduce a body, informed
with all the attributes of a great Queen, her crabbedness, courage,
frailty, and terror, surely a head can be as fertile, looked down upon
from a chair of state by a lady whose eyes were always, if the
waxworks at the Abbey are to be trusted, wide open. The long,
curled hair, the dark head bent so reverently, so innocently before
her, implied a pair of the nest legs that a young nobleman has ever
stood upright upon; and violet eyes; and a heart of gold; and loyalty
and manly charm – all qualities which the old woman loved the
more the more they failed her. For she was growing old and worn
and bent before her time. The sound of cannon was always in her
ears. She saw always the glistening poison drop and the long
stiletto. As she sat at table she listened; she heard the guns in the
Channel;13 she dreaded – was that a curse, was that a whisper?
Innocence, simplicity, were all the more dear to her for the dark
background she set them against. And it was that same night, so
tradition has it, when Orlando was sound asleep, that she made over
formally, putting her hand and seal nally to the parchment, the gift
of the great monastic house14 that had been the Archbishop’s and
then the King’s to Orlando’s father.
Orlando slept all night in ignorance. He had been kissed by a
queen without knowing it. And perhaps, for women’s hearts are
intricate, it was his ignorance and the start he gave when her lips
touched him that kept the memory of her young cousin (for they
had blood in common) green in her mind. At any rate, two years of
this quiet country life had not passed, and Orlando had written no
more perhaps than twenty tragedies and a dozen histories and a
score of sonnets when a message came that he was to attend the
Queen at Whitehall.
‘Here’, she said, watching him advance down the long gallery
towards her, ‘comes my innocent!’ (There was a serenity about him
always which had the look of innocence when, technically, the word
was no longer applicable.)
‘Come!’ she said. She was sitting bolt upright beside the re. And
she held him a foot’s pace from her and looked him up and down.
Was she matching her speculations the other night with the truth
now visible? Did she nd her guesses justi ed? Eyes, mouth, nose,
breast, hips, hands – she ran them over; her lips twitched visibly as
she looked; but when she saw his legs she laughed out loud. He was
the very image of a noble gentleman. But inwardly? She ashed her
yellow hawk’s eyes upon him as if she would pierce his soul. The
young man withstood her gaze blushing only a damask rose as
became him. Strength, grace, romance, folly, poetry, youth – she
read him like a page. Instantly she plucked a ring from her nger
(the joint was swollen rather) and as she tted it to his, named him
her Treasurer and Steward; next hung about him chains of o ce;
and bidding him bend his knee, tied round it at the slenderest part
the jewelled order of the Garter. Nothing after that was denied him.
When she drove in state he rode at her carriage door. She sent him
to Scotland on a sad embassy to the unhappy Queen. He was about
to sail for the Polish wars when she recalled him. For how could she
bear to think of that tender esh torn and that curly head rolled in
the lust? She kept him with her. At the height of her triumph when
he guns were booming at the Tower15 and the air was thick nough
with gunpowder to make one sneeze and the huzzas of the people
rang beneath the windows, she pulled him down among the
cushions where her women had laid her (she was so worn and old)
and made him bury his face in that astonishing composition – she
had not changed her dress for a month – which smelt for all the
world, he thought, recalling his boyish memory, like some old
cabinet at home where his mother’s furs were stored. He rose, half
su ocated from the embrace. ‘This’, she breathed, ‘is my victory!’ –
even as a rocket roared up and dyed her cheeks scarlet.
For the old woman loved him. And the Queen, who knew a man
when she saw one, though not, it is said, in the usual way, plotted
for him a splendid ambitious career. Lands were given him, houses
assigned him. He was to be the son of her old age; the limb of her
in rmity; the oak tree on which she leant her degradation. She
croaked out these promises and strange domineering tendernesses
(they were at Richmond16 now) sitting bolt upright in her sti
brocades by the re which, however high they piled it, never kept
her warm.
Meanwhile, the long winter months drew on. Every tree in the
Park was lined with frost. The river ran sluggishly. One day when
the snow was on the ground and the dark panelled rooms were full
of shadows and the stags were barking in the Park, she saw in the
mirror, which she kept for fear of spies always by her, through the
door, which she kept for fear of murderers always open, a boy –
could it be Orlando? – kissing a girl – who in the Devil’s name was
the brazen hussy? Snatching at her golden-hilted sword she struck
violently at the mirror. The glass crashed; people came running; she
was lifted and set in her chair again; but she was stricken after that
and groaned much, as her days wore to an end, of man’s treachery.
It was Orlando’s fault perhaps; yet, after all, are we to blame
Orlando? The age was the Elizabethan; their morals were not ours;
nor their poets; nor their climate; nor their vegetables even.
Everything was di erent. The weather itself, the heat and cold of
summer and winter, was, we may believe, of another temper
altogether. The brilliant amorous day was divided as sheerly from
the night as land from water. Sunsets were redder and more intense;
dawns were whiter and more auroral. Of our crepuscular half-lights
and lingering twilights they knew nothing. The rain fell vehemently,
or not at all. The sun blazed or there was darkness. Translating this
to the spiritual regions as their wont is, the poets sang beautifully
how roses fade and petals fall. The moment is brief they sang; the
moment is over; one long night is then to be slept by all. As for
using the arti ces of the greenhouse or conservatory to prolong or
preserve these fresh pinks and roses, that was not their way. The
withered intricacies and ambiguities of our more gradual and
doubtful age were unknown to them. Violence was all. The ower
bloomed and faded. The sun rose and sank. The lover loved and
went. And what the poets said in rhyme, the young translated into
practice. Girls were roses, and their seasons were short as the
owers’. Plucked they must be before nightfall; for the day was brief
and the day was all. Thus, if Orlando followed the leading of the
climate, of the poets, of the age itself, and plucked his ower in the
window-seat even with the snow on the ground and the Queen
vigilant in the corridor, we can scarcely bring ourselves to blame
him. He was young; he was boyish; he did but as nature bade him
do. As for the girl, we know no more than Queen Elizabeth herself
did what her name was. It may have been Doris, Chloris, Delia, or
Diana,17 for he made rhymes to them all in turn; equally, she may
have been a court lady, or some serving maid. For Orlando’s taste
was broad; he was no lover of garden owers only; the wild and the
weeds even had always a fascination for him.
Here, indeed, we lay bare rudely, as a biographer may, a curious
trait in him, to be accounted for, perhaps, by the fact that a certain
grandmother of his had worn a smock and carried milkpails. Some
grains of the Kentish or Sussex earth were mixed with the thin, ne
 uid which came to him from Normandy. He held that the mixture
of brown earth and blue blood was a good one. Certain it is that he
had always a liking for low company, especially for that of lettered
people whose wits so often keep them under, as if there were the
sympathy of blood between them. At this season of his life, when his
head brimmed with rhymes and he never went to bed without
striking o some conceit, the cheek of an innkeeper’s daughter
seemed fresher and the wit of a gamekeeper’s niece seemed quicker
than those of the ladies at Court. Hence, he began going frequently
to Wapping Old Stairs18 and the beer gardens at night, wrapped in a
grey cloak to hide the star at his neck and the garter at his knee.
There, with a mug before him, among the sanded alleys and bowling
greens and all the simple architecture of such places, he listened to
sailors’ stories of hardship and horror and cruelty on the Spanish
main; how some had lost their toes, others their noses – for the
spoken story was never so rounded or so nely coloured as the
written. Especially he loved to hear them volley forth their songs of
the Azores, while the parrakeets, which they had brought from
those parts, pecked at the rings in their ears, tapped with their hard
acquisitive beaks at the rubies on their ngers, and swore as vilely
as their masters. The women were scarcely less bold in their speech
and less free in their manners than the birds. They perched on his
knee, ung their arms round his neck and, guessing that something
out of the common lay hid beneath his du e cloak, were quite as
eager to come at the truth of the matter as Orlando himself.
 Nor was opportunity lacking. The river was astir early and late
with barges, wherries, and craft of all description. Every day sailed
to sea some ne ship bound for the Indies; now and again another
blackened and ragged with hairy unknown men on board crept
painfully to anchor. No one missed a boy or girl if they dallied a
little on the water after sunset; or raised an eyebrow if gossip had
seen them sleeping soundly among the treasure sacks safe in each
other’s arms. Such indeed was the adventure that befel Orlando,
Sukey, and the Earl of Cumberland.19 The day was hot; their loves
had been active; they had fallen asleep among the rubies. Late that
night the Earl, whose fortunes were much bound up in the Spanish
ventures, came to check the booty alone with a lantern. He ashed
the light on a barrel. He started back with an oath. Twined about
the cask two spirits lay sleeping. Superstitious by nature, and his
conscience laden with many a crime, the Earl took the couple – they
were wrapped in a red cloak, and Sukey’s bosom was almost as
white as the eternal snows of Orlando’s poetry – for a phantom
sprung from the graves of drowned sailors to upbraid him. He
crossed himself. He vowed repentance. The row of almshouses still
standing in the Sheen Road is the visible fruit of that moment’s
panic. Twelve poor old women of the parish to-day drink tea and
tonight bless his Lordship for a roof above their heads; so that illicit
love in a treasure ship – but we omit the moral.
Soon, however, Orlando grew tired, not only of the discomfort of
this way of life, and of the crabbed streets of the neighbourhood,
but of the primitive manners of the people. For it has to be
remembered that crime and poverty had none of the attraction for
the Elizabethans that they have for us. They had none of our
modern shame of book learning; none of our belief that to be born
the son of a butcher is a blessing and to be unable to read a virtue;
no fancy that what we call ‘life’ and ‘reality’ are somehow connected
with ignorance and brutality; nor, indeed, any equivalent for these
two words at all. It was not to seek ‘life’ that Orlando went among
them; not in quest of ‘reality’ that he left them. But when he had
heard a score of times how Jakes had lost his nose and Sukey her
honour – and they told the stories admirably, it must be admitted –
he began to be a little weary of the repetition, for a nose can only be
cut o in one way and maidenhood lost in another – or so it seemed
to him – whereas the arts and the sciences had a diversity about
them which stirred his curiosity profoundly. So, always keeping
them in happy memory, he left o frequenting the beer gardens and
the skittle alleys, hung his grey cloak in his wardrobe, let his star
shine at his neck and his garter twinkle at his knee, and appeared
once more at the Court of King James. He was young, he was rich,
he was handsome. No one could have been received with greater
acclamation than he was.
It is certain indeed that many ladies were ready to show him their
favours. The names of three at least were freely coupled with his in
marriage – Clorinda, Favilla, Euphrosyne20 – so he called them in
his sonnets.
To take them in order; Clorinda was a sweet-mannered gentle lady
enough – indeed Orlando was greatly taken with her for six months
and a half; but she had white eyelashes and could not bear the sight
of blood. A hare brought up roasted at her father’s table turned her
faint. She was much under the in uence of the Priests too, and
stinted her underlinen in order to give to the poor. She took it on
her to reform Orlando of his sins, which sickened him, so that he
drew back from the marriage, and did not much regret it when she
died soon after of the small-pox.
Favilla, who comes next, was of a di erent sort altogether. She
was the daughter of a poor Somersetshire gentleman; who, by sheer
assiduity and the use of her eyes had worked her way up at court,
where her address in horsemanship, her ne instep, and her grace in
dancing won the admiration of all. Once, however, she was so ill-
advised as to whip a spaniel that had torn one of her silk stockings
(and it must be said in justice that Favilla had few stockings and
those for the most part of drugget) within an inch of its life beneath
Orlando’s window. Orlando, who was a passionate lover of animals,
now noticed that her teeth were crooked, and the two front turned
inward, which, he said, is a sure sign of a perverse and cruel
disposition in woman, and so broke the engagement that very night
for ever.
The third, Euphrosyne, was by far the most serious of his ames.
She was by birth one of the Irish Desmonds and had therefore a
family tree of her own as old and deeply rooted as Orlando’s itself.
She was fair, orid, and a tri e phlegmatic. She spoke Italian well,
had a perfect set of teeth in the upper jaw, though those on the
lower were slightly discoloured. She was never without a whippet or
spaniel at her knee; fed them with white bread from her own plate;
sang sweetly to the virginals; and was never dressed before mid-day
owing to the extreme care she took of her person. In short, she
would have made a perfect wife for such a nobleman as Orlando,
and matters had gone so far that the lawyers on both sides were
busy with covenants, jointures, settlements, messuages, tenements,
and whatever is needed before one great fortune can mate with
another when, with the suddenness and severity that then marked
the English climate, came the Great Frost.
The Great Frost21 was, historians tell us, the most severe that has
ever visited these islands. Birds froze in mid-air and fell like stones
to the ground. At Norwich a young countrywoman started to cross
the road in her usual robust health and was seen by the onlookers to
turn visibly to powder and be blown in a pu of dust over the roofs
as the icy blast struck her at the street corner. The mortality among
sheep and cattle was enormous. Corpses froze and could not be
drawn from the sheets. It was no uncommon sight to come upon a
whole herd of swine frozen immovable upon the road. The elds
were full of shepherds, ploughmen, teams of horses, and little bird-
scaring boys all struck stark in the act of the moment, one with his
hand to his nose, another with the bottle to his lips, a third with a
stone raised to throw at the raven who sat, as if stu ed, upon the
hedge within a yard of him. The severity of the frost was so
extraordinary that a kind of petrifaction sometimes ensued; and it
was commonly supposed that the great increase of rocks in some
parts of Derbyshire was due to no eruption, for there was none, but
to the solidi cation of unfortunate wayfarers who had been turned
literally to stone where they stood. The Church could give little help
in the matter, and though some landowners had these relics blessed,
the most part preferred to use them either as landmarks, scratching-
posts for sheep, or, when the form of the stone allowed, drinking
troughs for cattle, which purposes they serve, admirably for the
most part, to this day.
But while the country people su ered the extremity of want, and
the trade of the country was at a standstill, London enjoyed a
carnival of the utmost brilliancy. The Court was at Greenwich, and
the new King seized the opportunity that his coronation gave him to
curry favour with the citizens. He directed that the river, which was
frozen to a depth of twenty feet and more for six or seven miles on
either side, should be swept, decorated and given all the semblance
of a park or pleasure ground, with arbours, mazes, alleys, drinking
booths, etc., at his expense. For himself and the courtiers, he
reserved a certain space immediately opposite the Palace gates;
which, railed o from the public only by a silken rope, became at
once the centre of the most brilliant society in England. Great
statesmen, in their beards and ru s, despatched a airs of state
under the crimson awning of the Royal Pagoda. Soldiers planned the
conquest of the Moor and the downfall of the Turk in striped
arbours surmounted by plumes of ostrich feathers. Admirals strode
up and down the narrow pathways, glass in hand, sweeping the
horizon and telling stories of the north-west passage22 and the
Spanish Armada. Lovers dallied upon divans spread with sables.
Frozen roses fell in showers when the Queen and her ladies walked
abroad. Coloured balloons hovered motionless in the air. Here and
there burnt vast bon res of cedar and oak wood, lavishly salted, so
that the ames were of green, orange, and purple re. But however
ercely they burnt, the heat was not enough to melt the ice which,
though of singular transparency, was yet of the hardness of steel. So
clear indeed was it that there could be seen, congealed at a depth of
several feet, here a porpoise, there a ounder. Shoals of eels lay
motionless in a trance, but whether their state was one of death or
merely of suspended animation which the warmth would revive
puzzled the philosophers. Near London Bridge,23 where the river
had frozen to a depth of some twenty fathoms, a wrecked wherry
boat was plainly visible, lying on the bed of the river where it had
sunk last autumn, overladen with apples. The old bumboat woman,
who was carrying her fruit to market on the Surrey side, sat there in
her plaids and farthingales with her lap full of apples, for all the
world as if she were about to serve a customer, though a certain
blueness about the lips hinted the truth. ’Twas a sight King James
specially liked to look upon, and he would bring a troupe of
courtiers to gaze with him. In short, nothing could exceed the
brilliancy and gaiety of the scene by day. But it was at night that the
carnival was at its merriest. For the frost continued unbroken; the
nights were of perfect stillness; the moon and stars blazed with the
hard xity of diamonds, and to the ne music of ute and trumpet
the courtiers danced.
 Orlando, it is true, was none of those who tread lightly the
corantoe and lavolta;24 he was clumsy and a little absent-minded.
He much preferred the plain dances of his own country, which he
had danced as a child to these fantastic foreign measures. He had
indeed just brought his feet together about six in the evening of the
seventh of January at the nish of some such quadrille or minuet
when he beheld, coming from the pavilion of the Muscovite
Embassy, a gure, which, whether boy’s or woman’s, for the loose
tunic and trousers of the Russian fashion served to disguise the sex,
lled him with the highest curiosity. The person, whatever the name
or sex, was about middle height, very slenderly fashioned, and
dressed entirely in oyster-coloured velvet, trimmed with some
unfamiliar greenish-coloured fur. But these details were obscured by
the extraordinary seductiveness which issued from the whole
person. Images, metaphors of the most extreme and extravagant
twined and twisted in his mind. He called her a melon, a pineapple,
an olive tree, an emerald, and a fox in the snow all in the space of
three seconds; he did not know whether he had heard her, tasted
her, seen her, or all three together. (For though we must pause not a
moment in the narrative we may here hastily note that all his
images at this time were simple in the extreme to match his senses
and were mostly taken from things he had liked the taste of as a
boy. But if his senses were simple they were at the same time
extremely strong. To pause therefore and seek the reasons of things
is out of the question.)… A melon, an emerald, a fox in the snow −
so he raved, so he stared. When the boy, for alas, a boy it must be
− no woman could skate with such speed and vigour − swept
almost on tiptoe past him, Orlando was ready to tear his hair with
vexation that the person was of his own sex, and thus all embraces
were out of the question. But the skater came closer. Legs, hands,
carriage, were a boy’s, but no boy ever had a mouth like that; no
boy had those breasts; no boy had eyes which looked as if they had
been shed from the bottom of the sea. Finally, coming to a stop
and sweeping a curtsey with the utmost grace to the King, who was
shu ing past on the arm of some Lord-in-waiting, the unknown
skater came to a standstill. She was not a handsbreadth o . She was
a woman. Orlando stared; trembled; turned hot; turned cold; longed
to hurl himself through the summer air; to crush acorns beneath his
feet; to toss his arms with the beech trees and the oaks. As it was, he
drew his lips up over his small white teeth; opened them perhaps
half an inch as if to bite; shut them as if he had bitten. The Lady
Euphrosyne hung upon his arm.
The stranger’s name, he found, was the Princess Marousha
Stanilovska Dagmar Natasha Iliana Romanovitch,25 and she had
come in the train of the Muscovite Ambassador, who was her uncle
perhaps, or perhaps her father, to attend the coronation. Very little
was known of the Muscovites. In their great beards and furred hats
they sat almost silent; drinking some black liquid which they spat
out now and then upon the ice. None spoke English, and French
with which some at least were familiar was then little spoken at the
English Court.
 It was through this accident that Orlando and the Princess became
acquainted. They were seated opposite each other at the great table
spread under a huge awning for the entertainment of the notables.
The Princess was placed between two young Lords, one Lord Francis
Vere and the other the young Earl of Moray. It was laughable to see
the predicament she soon had them in, for though both were ne
lads in their way, the babe unborn had as much knowledge of the
French tongue as they had. When at the beginning of dinner the
Princess turned to the Earl and said, with a grace which ravished his
heart, ‘Je crois avoir fait la connaissance d’un gentilhomme qui vous
était apparenté en Pologne l’été dernier’, or ‘La beauté des dames de
la cour d’Angleterre me met dans le ravissement. On ne peut voir
une dame plus gracieuse que votre reine, ni une coi ure plus belle
que la sienne,’26 both Lord Francis and the Earl showed the highest
embarrassment. The one helped her largely to horse-radish sauce,
the other whistled to his dog and made him beg for a marrow bone.
At this the Princess could no longer contain her laughter, and
Orlando, catching her eyes across the boars’ heads and stu ed
peacocks, laughed too. He laughed, but the laugh on his lips froze in
wonder. Whom had he loved, what had he loved, he asked himself
in a tumult of emotion, until now? An old woman, he answered, all
skin and bone. Red-cheeked trulls too many to mention. A puling
nun. A hard-bitten cruel-mouthed adventuress. A nodding mass of
lace and ceremony. Love had meant to him nothing but sawdust and
cinders. The joys he had had of it tasted insipid in the extreme. He
marvelled how he could have gone through with it without
yawning. For as he looked the thickness of his blood melted; the ice
turned to wine in his veins; he heard the waters owing and the
birds singing; spring broke over the hard wintry landscape; his
manhood woke; he grasped a sword in his hand; he charged a more
daring foe than Pole or Moor; he dived in deep water; he saw the
ower of danger growing in a crevice; he stretched his hand − in
fact he was rattling o one of his most impassioned sonnets when
the Princess addressed him, ‘Would you have the goodness to pass
the salt?’
He blushed deeply.
‘With all the pleasure in the world, Madame,’ he replied, speaking
French with a perfect accent. For, heaven be praised, he spoke the
tongue as his own; his mother’s maid had taught him. Yet perhaps it
would have been better for him had he never learnt that tongue;
never answered that voice; never followed the light of those eyes…
The Princess continued. Who were those bumpkins, she asked him,
who sat beside her with the manners of stablemen? What was the
nauseating mixture they had poured on her plate? Did the dogs eat
at the same table with the men in England? Was that gure of fun at
the end of the table with her hair rigged up like a Maypole (comme
une grande perche mal fagotée) really the Queen? And did the King
always slobber like that? And which of those popinjays was George
Villiers?27 Though these questions rather discomposed Orlando at
rst, they were put with such archness and drollery that he could
not help but laugh; and as he saw from the blank faces of the
company that nobody understood a word, he answered her as freely
as she asked him, speaking, as she did, in perfect French.
Thus began an intimacy between the two which soon became the
scandal of the Court.
Soon it was observed Orlando paid the Muscovite far more
attention than mere civility demanded. He was seldom far from her
side, and their conversation, though unintelligible to the rest, was
carried on with such animation, provoked such blushes and
laughter, that the dullest could guess the subject. Moreover, the
change in Orlando himself was extraordinary. Nobody had ever seen
him so animated. In one night he had thrown o his boyish
clumsiness; he was changed from a sulky stripling, who could not
enter a ladies’ room without sweeping half the ornaments from the
table, to a nobleman, full of grace and manly courtesy. To see him
hand the Muscovite (as she was called) to her sledge, or o er her his
hand for the dance, or catch the spotted kerchief which she had let
drop, or discharge any other of those manifold duties which the
supreme lady exacts and the lover hastens to anticipate was a sight
to kindle the dull eyes of age, and to make the quick pulse of youth
beat faster. Yet over it all hung a cloud. The old men shrugged their
shoulders. The young tittered between their ngers. All knew that
Orlando was betrothed to another. The Lady Margaret O’Brien
O’Dare O’Reilly Tyrconnel (for that was the proper name of
Euphrosyne of the Sonnets) wore Orlando’s splendid sapphire on the
second nger of her left hand. It was she who had the supreme right
to his attentions. Yet she might drop all the handkerchiefs in her
wardrobe (of which she had many scores) upon the ice and Orlando
never stooped to pick them up. She might wait twenty minutes for
him to hand her to her sledge, and in the end have to be content
with the services of her Blackamoor. When she skated, which she
did rather clumsily, no one was at her elbow to encourage her, and,
if she fell, which she did rather heavily, no one raised her to her feet
and dusted the snow from her petticoats. Although she was
naturally phlegmatic, slow to take o ence, and more reluctant than
most people to believe that a mere foreigner could oust her from
Orlando’s a ections, still even the Lady Margaret herself was
brought at last to suspect that something was brewing against her
peace of mind.
Indeed, as the days passed, Orlando took less and less care to hide
his feelings. Making some excuse or other, he would leave the
company as soon as they had dined, or steal away from the skaters,
who were forming sets for a quadrille. Next moment it would be
seen that the Muscovite was missing too. But what most outraged
the Court, and stung it in its tenderest part, which is its vanity, was
that the couple was often seen to slip under the silken rope, which
railed o the Royal enclosure from the public part of the river and
to disappear among the crowd of common people. For suddenly the
Princess would stamp her foot and cry, ‘Take me away. I detest your
English mob,’ by which she meant the English Court itself. She could
stand it no longer. It was full of prying old women, she said, who
stared in one’s face, and of bumptious young men who trod on one’s
toes. They smelt bad. Their dogs ran between her legs. It was like
being in a cage. In Russia they had rivers ten miles broad on which
one could gallop six horses abreast all day long without meeting a
soul. Besides, she wanted to see the Tower, the Beefeaters, the
Heads on Temple Bar, and the jewellers’ shops in the city. Thus, it
came about that Orlando took her to the city, showed her the
Beefeaters and the rebels’ heads, and bought her whatever took her
fancy in the Royal Exchange.28 But this was not enough. Each
increasingly desired the other’s company in privacy all day long
where there were none to marvel or to stare. Instead of taking the
road to London, therefore, they turned the other way about and
were soon beyond the crowd among the frozen reaches of the
Thames where, save for sea birds and some old country woman
hacking at the ice in a vain attempt to draw a pailful of water or
gathering what sticks or dead leaves she could nd for ring, not a
living soul ever came their way. The poor kept closely to their
cottages, and the better sort, who could a ord it, crowded for
warmth and merriment to the city.
Hence, Orlando and Sasha, as he called her for short, and because
it was the name of a white Russian fox29 he had had as a boy − a
creature soft as snow, but with teeth of steel, which bit him so
savagely that his father had it killed − hence, they had the river to
themselves. Hot with skating and with love they would throw
themselves down in some solitary reach, where the yellow osiers
fringed the bank, and wrapped in a great fur cloak Orlando would
take her in his arms, and know, for the rst time, he murmured, the
delights of love. Then, when the ecstasy was over and they lay
lulled in a swoon on the ice, he would tell her of his other loves,
and how, compared with her, they had been of wood, of sackcloth,
and of cinders. And laughing at his vehemence, she would turn once
more in his arms and give him, for love’s sake, one more embrace.
And then they would marvel that the ice did not melt with their
heat, and pity the poor old woman who had no such natural means
of thawing it, but must hack at it with a chopper of cold steel. And
then, wrapped in their sables, they would talk of everything under
the sun; of sights and travels; of Moor and Pagan; of this man’s
beard and that woman’s skin; of a rat that fed from her hand at
table; of the arras that moved always in the hall at home;30 of a
face; of a feather. Nothing was too small for such converse, nothing
was too great.
Then, suddenly Orlando would fall into one of his moods of
melancholy; the sight of the old woman hobbling over the ice might
be the cause of it, or nothing; and would ing himself face
downwards on the ice and look into the frozen waters and think of
death. For the philosopher is right31 who says that nothing thicker
than a knife’s blade separates happiness from melancholy; and he
goes on to opine that one is twin fellow to the other; and draws
from this the conclusion that all extremes of feeling are allied to
madness; and so bids us take refuge in the true Church (in his view
the Anabaptist), which is the only harbour, port, anchorage, etc., he
said, for those tossed on this sea.
‘All ends in death,’ Orlando would say, sitting upright, his face
clouded with gloom. (For that was the way his mind worked now, in
violent see-saws from life to death, stopping at nothing in between,
so that the biographer must not stop either, but must y as fast as
he can and so keep pace with the unthinking passionate foolish
actions and sudden extravagant words in which, it is impossible to
deny, Orlando at this time of his life indulged.)
‘All ends in death,’ Orlando would say, sitting upright on the ice.
But Sasha who after all had no English blood in her but was from
Russia where the sunsets are longer, the dawns less sudden, and
sentences often left un nished from doubt as to how best to end
them − Sasha stared at him, perhaps sneered at him, for he must
have seemed a child to her, and said nothing. But at length the ice
grew cold beneath them, which she disliked, so pulling him to his
feet again, she talked so enchantingly, so wittily, so wisely (but
unfortunately always in French, which notoriously loses its avour
in translation) that he forgot the frozen waters or night coming or
the old woman or whatever it was, and would try to tell her −
plunging and splashing among a thousand images which had gone
as stale as the women who inspired them − what she was like.
Snow, cream, marble, cherries, alabaster, golden wire? None of
these. She was like a fox, or an olive tree; like the waves of the sea
when you look down upon them from a height; like an emerald; like
the sun on a green hill which is yet clouded − like nothing he had
seen or known in England. Ransack the language as he might, words
failed him. He wanted another landscape, and another tongue.
English was too frank, too candid, too honeyed a speech for Sasha.
For in all she said, however open she seemed and voluptuous, there
was something hidden; in all she did, however daring, there was
something concealed. So the green ame seems hidden in the
emerald, or the sun prisoned in a hill. The clearness was only
outward; within was a wandering ame. It came; it went; she never
shone with the steady beam of an Englishwoman − here, however,
remembering the Lady Margaret and her petticoats, Orlando ran
wild in his transports and swept her over the ice, faster, faster,
vowing that he would chase the ame, dive for the gem, and so on
and so on, the words coming on the pants of his breath with the
passion of a poet whose poetry is half pressed out of him by pain.
But Sasha was silent. When Orlando had done telling her that she
was a fox, an olive tree, or a green hill-top, and had given her the
whole history of his family; how their house was one of the most
ancient in Britain; how they had come from Rome with the Caesars
and had the right to walk down the Corso (which is the chief street
in Rome) under a tasselled palanquin,32 which he said is a privilege
reserved only for those of imperial blood (for there was an orgulous
credulity about him which was pleasant enough), he would pause
and ask her, Where was her own house? What was her father? Had
she brothers? Why was she here alone with her uncle? Then,
somehow, though she answered readily enough, an awkwardness
would come between them. He suspected at rst that her rank was
not as high as she would like; or that she was ashamed of the savage
ways of her people, for he had heard that the women in Muscovy
wear beards and the men are covered with fur from the waist down;
that both sexes are smeared with tallow to keep the cold out, tear
meat with their ngers and live in huts where an English noble
would scruple to keep his cattle; so that he forbore to press her. But
on re ection, he concluded that her silence could not be for that
reason; she herself was entirely free from hair on the chin; she
dressed in velvet and pearls, and her manners were certainly not
those of a woman bred in a cattle-shed.
What, then, did she hide from him? The doubt underlying the
tremendous force of his feelings was like a quicksand beneath a
monument which shifts suddenly and makes the whole pile shake.
The agony would seize him suddenly. Then he would blaze out in
such wrath that she did not know how to quiet him. Perhaps she did
not want to quiet him; perhaps his rages pleased her and she
provoked them purposely − such is the curious obliquity of the
Muscovitish temperament.
To continue the story − skating farther than their wont that day
they reached that part of the river where the ships had anchored
and been frozen in midstream. Among them was the ship of the
Muscovite Embassy ying its double-headed black eagle from the
main mast, which was hung with many-coloured icicles several
yards in length. Sasha had left some of her clothing on board, and
supposing the ship to be empty they climbed on deck and went in
search of it. Remembering certain passages in his own past, Orlando
would not have marvelled had some good citizens sought this refuge
before them; and so it turned out. They had not ventured far when a
ne young man started up from some business of his own behind a
coil of rope and saying, apparently, for he spoke Russian, that he
was one of the crew and would help the Princess to nd what she
wanted, lit a lump of candle and disappeared with her into the
lower parts of the ship.
Time went by, and Orlando, wrapped in his own dreams, thought
only of the pleasures of life; of his jewel; of her rarity; of means for
making her irrevocably and indissolubly his own. Obstacles there
were and hardships to be overcome. She was determined to live in
Russia, where there were frozen rivers and wild horses and men, she
said, who gashed each other’s throats open. It is true that a
landscape of pine and snow, habits of lust and slaughter, did not
entice him. Nor was he anxious to cease his pleasant country ways
of sport and tree-planting; relinquish his o ce; ruin his career;
shoot the reindeer instead of the rabbit; drink vodka instead of
canary, and slip a knife up his sleeve − for what purpose, he knew
not. Still, all this and more than all this he would do for her sake. As
for his marriage with the Lady Margaret, xed though it was for this
day sennight,33 the thing was so palpably absurd that he scarcely
gave it a thought. Her kinsmen would abuse him for deserting a
great lady; his friends would deride him for ruining the nest career
in
THE RUSSIAN PRINCESS AS A CHILD
the world for a Cossack woman and a waste of snow − it weighed
not a straw in the balance compared with Sasha herself. On the rst
dark night they would y. They would take ship to Russia. So he
pondered; so he plotted as he walked up and down the deck.
He was recalled, turning westward, by the sight of the sun, slung
like an orange on the cross of St. Paul’s.34 It was blood-red and
sinking rapidly. It must be almost evening. Sasha had been gone this
hour and more. Seized instantly with those dark forebodings which
shadowed even his most con dent thoughts of her, he plunged the
way he had seen them go into the hold of the ship; and, after
stumbling among chests and barrels in the darkness, was made
aware by a faint glimmer in a corner that they were seated there.
For one second, he had a vision of them; saw Sasha seated on the
sailor’s knee; saw her bend towards him; saw them embrace before
the light was blotted out in a red cloud by his rage. He blazed into
such a howl of anguish that the whole ship echoed. Sasha threw
herself between them, or the sailor would have been sti ed before
he could draw his cutlass. Then a deadly sickness came over
Orlando, and they had to lay him on the oor and give him brandy
to drink before he revived. And then, when he had recovered and
was sat upon a heap of sacking on deck, Sasha hung over him,
passing before his dizzied eyes softly, sinuously, like the fox that
had bit him, now cajoling, now denouncing, so that he came to
doubt what he had seen. Had not the candle guttered; had not the
shadows moved? The box was heavy, she said; the man was helping
her to move it. Orlando believed her one moment − for who can be
sure that his rage has not painted what he most dreads to nd? −
the next was the more violent with anger at her deceit. Then Sasha
herself turned white; stamped her foot on deck; said she would go
that night, and called upon her Gods to destroy her, if she, a
Romanovitch, had lain in the arms of a common seaman. Indeed,
looking at them together (which he could hardly bring himself to
do) Orlando was outraged by the foulness of his imagination that
could have painted so frail a creature in the paws of that hairy sea
brute. The man was huge; stood six feet four in his stockings; wore
common wire rings in his ears; and looked like a dray horse upon
which some wren or robin has perched in its ight. So he yielded;
believed her; and asked her pardon. Yet, when they were going
down the ship’s side, lovingly again, Sasha paused with her hand on
the ladder, and called back to this tawny wide-cheeked monster a
volley of Russian greetings, jests, or endearments, not a word of
which Orlando could understand. But there was something in her
tone (it might be the fault of the Russian consonants) that reminded
Orlando of a scene some nights since, when he had come upon her
in secret gnawing a candle-end in a corner, which she had picked
from the oor. True, it was pink; it was gilt; and it was from the
King’s table; but it was tallow, and she gnawed it. Was there not, he
thought, handing her on to the ice, something rank in her,
something coarse avoured, something peasant born? And he
fancied her at forty grown unwieldy though she was now slim as a
reed, and lethargic though she was now blithe as a lark. But again
as they skated towards London such suspicions melted in his breast,
and he felt as if he had been hooked by a great sh through the nose
and rushed through the waters unwillingly, yet with his own
consent.
It was an evening of astonishing beauty. As the sun sank, all the
domes, spires, turrets, and pinnacles of London rose in inky
blackness against the furious red sunset clouds. Here was the fretted
cross at Charing; there the dome of St. Paul’s; there the massy
square of the Tower buildings; there like a grove of trees stripped of
all leaves save a knob at the end were the heads on the pikes at
Temple Bar. Now the Abbey windows were lit up and burnt like a
heavenly, many-coloured shield (in Orlando’s fancy); now all the
west seemed a golden window with troops of angels (in Orlando’s
fancy again) passing up and down the heavenly stairs perpetually.
All the time they seemed to be skating on fathomless depths of air,
so blue the ice had become; and so glassy smooth was it that they
sped quicker and quicker to the city with the white gulls circling
about them, and cutting in the air with their wings the very same
sweeps that they cut on the ice with their skates.
Sasha, as if to reassure him, was tenderer than usual and even
more delightful. Seldom would she talk about her past life, but now
she told him how, in winter in Russia, she would listen to the
wolves howling across the steppes, and thrice, to show him, she
barked like a wolf. Upon which he told her of the stags in the snow
at home, and how they would stray into the great hall for warmth
and be fed by an old man with porridge from a bucket.35 And then
she praised him; for his love of beasts; for his gallantry; for his legs.
Ravished with her praises and shamed to think how he had
maligned her by fancying her on the knees of a common sailor and
grown fat and lethargic at forty, he told her that he could nd no
words to praise her; yet instantly bethought him how she was like
the spring and green grass and rushing waters, and seizing her more
tightly than ever, he swung her with him half across the river so
that the gulls and the cormorants swung too. And halting at length,
out of breath, she said, panting slightly, that he was like a million-
candled Christmas tree (such as they have in Russia) hung with
yellow globes; incandescent; enough to light a whole street by; (so
one might translate it) for what with his glowing cheeks, his dark
curls, his black and crimson cloak, he looked as if he were burning
with his own radiance, from a lamp lit within.
All the colour, save the red of Orlando’s cheeks, soon faded. Night
came on. As the orange light of sunset vanished it was succeeded by
an astonishing white glare from the torches, bon res, aming
cressets, and other devices by which the river was lit up and the
strangest transformation took place. Various churches and
noblemen’s palaces, whose fronts were of white stone showed in
streaks and patches as if oating on the air. Of St. Paul’s, in
particular, nothing was left but a gilt cross. The Abbey appeared like
the grey skeleton of a leaf. Everything su ered emaciation and
transformation. As they approached the carnival, they heard a deep
note like that struck on a tuning-fork which boomed louder and
louder until it became an uproar. Every now and then a great shout
followed a rocket into the air. Gradually they could discern little
 gures breaking o from the vast crowd and spinning hither and
thither like gnats on the surface of a river. Above and around this
brilliant circle like a bowl of darkness pressed the deep black of a
winter’s night. And then into this darkness there began to rise with
pauses, which kept the expectation alert and the mouth open,
owering rockets; crescents; serpents; a crown. At one moment the
woods and distant hills showed green as on a summer’s day; the
next all was winter and blackness again.
By this time Orlando and the Princess were close to the Royal
enclosure and found their way barred by a great crowd of the
common people, who were pressing as near to the silken rope as
they dared. Loth to end their privacy and encounter the sharp eyes
that were on the watch for them, the couple lingered there,
shouldered by apprentices; tailors; shwives; horse dealers; cony
catchers;36 starving scholars; maid-servants in their whimples;
orange girls; ostlers; sober citizens; bawdy tapsters; and a crowd of
little ragamu ns such as always haunt the outskirts of a crowd,
screaming and scrambling among people’s feet − all the ri -ra of
the London streets indeed was there, jesting and jostling, here
casting dice, telling fortunes, shoving, tickling, pinching; here
uproarious, there glum; some of them with mouths gaping a yard
wide; others as little reverent as daws on a house-top; all as
variously rigged out as their purse or stations allowed; here in fur
and broadcloth; there in tatters with their feet kept from the ice
only by a dishclout bound about them. The main press of people, it
appeared, stood opposite a booth or stage something like our Punch
and Judy show37 upon which some kind of theatrical performance
was going forward. A black man was waving his arms and
vociferating. There was a woman in white laid upon a bed. Rough
though the staging was, the actors running up and down a pair of
steps and sometimes tripping, and the crowd stamping their feet and
whistling, or when they were bored, tossing a piece of orange peel
on to the ice which a dog would scramble for, still the astonishing,
sinuous melody of the words stirred Orlando like music. Spoken
with extreme speed and a daring agility of tongue which reminded
him of the sailors singing in the beer gardens at Wapping, the words
even without meaning were as wine to him. But now and again a
single phrase would come to him over the ice which was as if torn
from the depths of his heart. The frenzy of the Moor seemed to him
his own frenzy, and when the Moor su ocated the woman in her
bed it was Sasha he killed with his own hands.
At last the play was ended. All had grown dark. The tears
streamed down his face. Looking up into the sky there was nothing
but blackness there too. Ruin and death, he thought, cover all. The
life of man ends in the grave. Worms devour us.

Methinks it should be now a huge eclipse

Of sun and moon, and that the a righted globe

Should yawn—38

Even as he said this a star of some pallor rose in his memory. The
night was dark; it was pitch dark; but it was such a night as this that
they had waited for; it was on such a night as this that they had
planned to y. He remembered everything. The time had come.
With a burst of passion he snatched Sasha to him, and hissed in her
ear ‘Jour de ma vie!’39 It was their signal. At midnight they would
meet at an inn near Blackfriars. Horses waited there. Everything was
in readiness for their ight. So they parted, she to her tent, he to
his. It still wanted an hour of the time.
Long before midnight Orlando was in waiting. The night was of so
inky a blackness that a man was on you before he could be seen,
which was all to the good, but it was also of the most solemn
stillness so that a horse’s hoof, or a child’s cry, could be heard at a
distance of half a mile. Many a time did Orlando, pacing the little
courtyard, hold his heart at the sound of some nag’s steady footfall
on the cobbles, or at the rustle of a woman’s dress. But the traveller
was only some merchant, making home belated; or some woman of
the quarter whose errand was nothing so innocent. They passed, and
the street was quieter than before. Then those lights which burnt
downstairs in the small, huddled quarters where the poor of the city
lived moved up to the sleeping-rooms, and then, one by one, were
extinguished. The street lanterns in these purlieus were few at most;
and the negligence of the night watchman often su ered them to
expire long before dawn. The darkness then became even deeper
than before. Orlando looked to the wicks of his lantern, saw to the
saddle girths; primed his pistols; examined his holsters; and did all
these things a dozen times at least till he could nd nothing more
needing his attention. Though it still lacked some twenty minutes to
midnight, he could not bring himself to go indoors to the inn
parlour, where the hostess was still serving sack and the cheaper
sort of canary wine to a few seafaring men, who would sit there
trolling their ditties, and telling their stories of Drake, Hawkins, and
Grenville,40 till they toppled o the benches and rolled asleep on
the sanded oor. The darkness was more compassionate to his
swollen and violent heart. He listened to every footfall; speculated
on every sound. Each drunken shout and each wail from some poor
wretch laid in the straw or in other distress cut his heart to the
quick, as if it boded ill omen to his venture. Yet, he had no fear for
Sasha. Her courage made nothing of the adventure. She would come
alone, in her cloak and trousers, booted like a man. Light as her
footfall was, it would hardly be heard, even in this silence.
So he waited in the darkness. Suddenly he was struck in the face
by a blow, soft, yet heavy, on the side of his cheek. So strung with
expectation was he, that he started and put his hand to his sword.
The blow was repeated a dozen times on forehead and cheek. The
dry frost had lasted so long that it took him a minute to realise that
these were raindrops falling; the blows were the blows of the rain.
At rst, they fell slowly, deliberately, one by one. But soon the six
drops became sixty; then six hundred; then ran themselves together
in a steady spout of water. It was as if the hard and consolidated sky
poured itself forth in one profuse fountain. In the space of ve
minutes Orlando was soaked to the skin.
Hastily putting the horses under cover, he sought shelter beneath
the lintel of the door whence he could still observe the courtyard.
The air was thicker now than ever, and such a steaming and droning
rose from the downpour that no footfall of man or beast could be
heard above it. The roads, pitted as they were with great holes,
would be under water and perhaps impassable. But of what e ect
this would have upon their ight he scarcely thought. All his senses
were bent upon gazing along the cobbled pathway − gleaming in
the light of the lantern − for Sasha’s coming. Sometimes, in the
darkness, he seemed to see her wrapped about with rain strokes. But
the phantom vanished. Suddenly, with an awful and ominous voice,
a voice full of horror and alarm which raised every hair of anguish
in Orlando’s soul, St. Paul’s struck the rst stroke of midnight. Four
times more it struck remorselessly. With the superstition of a lover,
Orlando had made out that it was on the sixth stroke that she would
come. But the sixth stroke echoed away, and the seventh came and
the eighth, and to his apprehensive mind they seemed notes rst
heralding and then proclaiming death and disaster. When the
twelfth struck he knew that his doom was sealed. It was useless for
the rational part of him to reason; she might be late; she might be
prevented; she might have missed her way. The passionate and
feeling heart of Orlando knew the truth. Other clocks struck,
jangling one after another. The whole world seemed to ring with the
news of her deceit and his derision. The old suspicions
subterraneously at work in him rushed forth from concealment
openly. He was bitten by a swarm of snakes, each more poisonous
than the last. He stood in the doorway in the tremendous rain
without moving. As the minutes passed, he sagged a little at the
knees. The downpour rushed on. In the thick of it, great guns
seemed to boom. Huge noises as of the tearing and rending of oak
trees could be heard. There were also wild cries and terrible
inhuman groanings. But Orlando stood there immovable till Paul’s
clock struck two, and then, crying aloud with an awful irony, and
all his teeth showing, ‘Jour de ma vie!’ he dashed the lantern to the
ground, mounted his horse and galloped he knew not where.
Some blind instinct, for he was past reasoning, must have driven
him to take the river bank in the direction of the sea. For when the
dawn broke, which it did with unusual suddenness, the sky turning
a pale yellow and the rain almost ceasing, he found himself on the
banks of the Thames o Wapping. Now a sight of the most
extraordinary nature met his eyes. Where, for three months and
more, there had been solid ice of such thickness that it seemed
permanent as stone, and a whole gay city had been stood on its
pavement, was now a race of turbulent yellow waters. The river had
gained its freedom in the night. It was as if a sulphur spring (to
which view many philosophers inclined) had risen from the volcanic
regions beneath and burst the ice asunder with such vehemence that
it swept the huge and massy fragments furiously apart. The mere
look of the water was enough to turn one giddy. All was riot and
confusion. The river was strewn with icebergs. Some of these were
as broad as a bowling green and as high as a house; others no bigger
than a man’s hat, but most fantastically twisted. Now would come
down a whole convoy of ice blocks sinking everything that stood in
their way. Now, eddying and swirling like a tortured serpent, the
river would seem to be hurtling itself between the fragments and
tossing them from bank to bank, so that they could be heard
smashing against the piers and pillars. But what was the most awful
and inspiring of terror was the sight of the human creatures who
had been trapped in the night and now paced their twisting and
precarious islands in the utmost agony of spirit. Whether they
jumped into the ood or stayed on the ice their doom was certain.
Sometimes quite a cluster of these poor creatures would come down
together, some on their knees, others suckling their babies. One old
man seemed to be reading aloud from a holy book. At other times,
and his fate perhaps was the most dreadful, a solitary wretch would
stride his narrow tenement alone. As they swept out to sea, some
could be heard crying vainly for help, making wild promises to
amend their ways, confessing their sins and vowing altars and
wealth if God would hear their prayers. Others were so dazed with
terror that they sat immovable and silent looking steadfastly before
them. One crew of young watermen or post-boys, to judge by their
liveries, roared and shouted the lewdest tavern songs, as if in
bravado, and were dashed against a tree and sunk with blasphemies
on their lips. An old nobleman − for such his furred gown and
golden chain proclaimed him − went down not far from where
Orlando stood, calling vengeance upon the Irish rebels,41 who, he
cried with his last breath, had plotted this devilry. Many perished
clasping some silver pot or other treasure to their breasts; and at
least a score of poor wretches were drowned by their own cupidity,
hurling themselves from the bank into the ood rather than let a
gold goblet escape them, or see before their eyes the disappearance
of some furred gown. For furniture, valuables, possessions of all
sorts were carried away on the icebergs. Among other strange sights
was to be seen a cat suckling its young; a table laid sumptuously for
a supper of twenty; a couple in bed; together with an extraordinary
number of cooking utensils.
Dazed and astounded, Orlando could do nothing for some time but
watch the appalling race of waters as it hurled itself past him. At
last, seeming to recollect himself, he clapped spurs to his horse and
galloped hard along the river bank in the direction of the sea.
Rounding a bend of the river, he came opposite that reach where,
not two days ago, the ships of the Ambassadors had seemed
immovably frozen. Hastily, he made count of them all; the French;
the Spanish; the Austrian; the Turk. All still oated, though the
French had broken loose from her moorings, and the Turkish vessel
had taken a great rent in her side and was fast lling with water.
But the Russian ship was nowhere to be seen. For one moment
Orlando thought it must have foundered; but, raising himself in his
stirrups and shading his eyes, which had the sight of a hawk’s, he
could just make out the shape of a ship on the horizon. The black
eagles were ying from the mast head. The ship of the Muscovite
Embassy was standing out to sea.42
Flinging himself from his horse, he made, in his rage, as if he
would breast the ood. Standing knee-deep in water he hurled at
the faithless woman all the insults that have ever been the lot of her
sex. Faithless, mutable, ckle, he called her; devil, adulteress,
deceiver; and the swirling waters took his words, and tossed at his
feet a broken pot and a little straw.
 Chapter II

The biographer is now faced with a di culty which it is better

perhaps to confess than to gloss over. Up to this point in telling the
story of Orlando’s life, documents, both private and historical, have
made it possible to ful l the rst duty of a biographer, which is to
plod, without looking to right or left, in the indelible footprints of
truth;1 unenticed by owers; regardless of shade; on and on
methodically till we fall plump into the grave and write nis on the
tombstone above our heads. But now we come to an episode which
lies right across our path, so that there is no ignoring it. Yet it is
dark, mysterious, and undocumented; so that there is no explaining
it. Volumes might be written in interpretation of it; whole religious
systems founded upon the signi cation of it. Our simple duty is to
state the facts as far as they are known, and so let the reader make
of them what he may.
In the summer of that disastrous winter which saw the frost, the
ood, the deaths of many thousands, and the complete downfall of
Orlando’s hopes − for he was exiled from Court; in deep disgrace
with the most powerful nobles of his time; the Irish house of
Desmond was justly enraged; the King had already trouble enough
with the Irish not to relish this further addition − in that summer
Orlando retired to his great house in the country and there lived in
complete solitude. One June morning − it was Saturday the 18th −
he failed to rise at his usual hour, and when his groom went to call
him he was found fast asleep. Nor could he be awakened. He lay as
if in a trance, without perceptible breathing; and though dogs were
set to bark under his window; cymbals, drums, bones beaten
perpetually in his room; a gorse bush put under his pillow; and
mustard plasters applied to his feet, still he did not wake, take food,
or show any sign of life for seven whole days. On the seventh day he
woke at his usual time (a quarter before eight, precisely) and turned
the whole posse of caterwauling wives and village soothsayers out
of his room; which was natural enough; but what was strange was
that he showed no consciousness of any such trance, but dressed
himself and sent for his horse as if he had woken from a single
night’s slumber. Yet some change, it was suspected, must have taken
place in the chambers of his brain, for though he was perfectly
rational and seemed graver and more sedate in his ways than
before, he appeared to have an imperfect recollection of his past
life. He would listen when people spoke of the great frost or the
skating or the carnival, but he never gave any sign, except by
passing his hand across his brow as if to wipe away some cloud, of
having witnessed them himself. When the events of the past six
months were discussed, he seemed not so much distressed as
puzzled, as if he were troubled by confused memories of some time
long gone or were trying to recall stories told him by another. It was
observed that if Russia was mentioned or Princesses or ships, he
would fall into a gloom of an uneasy kind and get up and look out
of the window or call one of the dogs to him, or take a knife and
carve a piece of cedar wood. But the doctors were hardly wiser then
than they are now, and after prescribing rest and exercise,
starvation and nourishment, society and solitude, that he should lie
in bed all day and ride forty miles between lunch and dinner,
together with the usual sedatives and irritants, diversi ed, as the
fancy took them, with possets of newt’s slobber on rising, and
draughts of peacock’s gall on going to bed, they left him to himself,
and gave it as their opinion that he had been asleep for a week.
But if sleep it was, of what nature, we can scarcely refrain from
asking, are such sleeps as these? Are they remedial measures −
trances in which the most galling memories, events that seem likely
to cripple life for ever, are brushed with a dark wing which rubs
their harshness o and gilds them, even the ugliest and basest, with
a lustre, an incandescence? Has the nger of death to be laid on the
tumult of life from time to time lest it rend us asunder? Are we so
made that we have to take death in small doses daily or we could
not go on with the business of living? And then what strange powers
are these that penetrate our most secret ways and change our most
treasured possessions without our willing it? Had Orlando, worn out
by the extremity of his su ering, died for a week, and then come to
life again? And if so, of what nature is death and of what nature
life?2 Having waited well over half an hour for an answer to these
questions, and none coming, let us get on with the story.
Now Orlando gave himself up to a life of extreme solitude. His
disgrace at Court and the violence of his grief were partly the reason
of it, but as he made no e ort to defend himself and seldom invited
anyone to visit him (though he had many friends who would
willingly have done so) it appeared as if to be alone in the great
house of his fathers suited his temper. Solitude was his choice. How
he spent his time, nobody quite knew. The servants, of whom he
kept a full retinue, though much of their business was to dust empty
rooms and to smooth the coverlets of beds that were never slept in,
watched, in the dark of the evening, as they sat over their cakes and
ale, a light passing along the galleries, through the banqueting-halls,
up the staircases, into the bedrooms, and knew that their master
was perambulating the house alone. None dared follow him, for the
house was haunted by a great variety of ghosts, and the extent of it
made it easy to lose one’s way and either fall down some hidden
staircase or open a door which, should the wind blow it to, would
shut upon one for ever — accidents of no uncommon occurrence, as
the frequent discovery of the skeletons of men and animals in
attitudes of great agony made evident. Then the light would be lost
altogether, and Mrs. Grimsditch,3 the housekeeper, would say to Mr.
Dupper, the chaplain, how she hoped his Lordship had not met with
some bad accident. Mr. Dupper would opine that his Lordship was
on his knees, no doubt, among the tombs of his ancestors in the
Chapel, which was in the Billiard Table Court, half a mile away on
the south side. For he had sins on his conscience, Mr. Dupper was
afraid; upon which Mrs. Grimsditch would retort, rather sharply,
that so had most of us; and Mrs. Stewkley and Mrs. Field and old
Nurse Carpenter would all raise their voices in his Lordship’s praise;
and the grooms and the stewards would swear that it was a
thousand pities to see so ne a nobleman moping about the house
when he might be hunting the fox or chasing the deer; and even the
little laundry maids and scullery maids, the Judys and the Faiths,
who were handing round the tankards and cakes, would pipe up
their testimony to his Lordship’s gallantry; for never was there a
kinder gentleman, or one more free with those little pieces of silver
which serve to buy a knot of ribbon or put a posy in one’s hair; until
even the Blackamoor whom they called Grace Robinson by way of
making a Christian woman of her, understood what they were at,
and agreed that his Lordship was a handsome, pleasant, darling
gentleman in the only way she could, that is to say by showing all
her teeth at once in a broad grin. In short, all his serving men and
women held him in high respect, and cursed the foreign Princess
(but they called her by a coarser name than that) who had brought
him to this pass.
But though it was probably cowardice, or love of hot ale, that led
Mr. Dupper to imagine his Lordship safe among the tombs so that he
need not go in search of him, it may well have been that Mr. Dupper
was right. Orlando now took a strange delight in thoughts of death
and decay, and, after pacing the long galleries and ballrooms with a
taper in his hand, looking at picture after picture as if he sought the
likeness of somebody whom he could not nd, would mount into
the family pew and sit for hours watching the banners stir and the
moonlight waver with a bat or death’s head moth to keep him
company. Even this was not enough for him, but he must descend
into the crypt where his ancestors lay,4 co n piled upon co n, for
ten generations together. The place was so seldom visited that the
rats had made free with the lead work, and now a thigh bone would
catch at his cloak as he passed, or he would crack the skull of some
old Sir Malise as it rolled beneath his foot. It was a ghastly
sepulchre; dug deep beneath the foundations of the house as if the
rst Lord of the family, who had come from France with the
Conqueror, had wished to testify how all pomp is built upon
corruption; how the skeleton lies beneath the esh; how we that
dance and sing above must lie below; how the crimson velvet turns
to dust; how the ring (here Orlando, stooping his lantern, would
pick up a gold circle lacking a stone, that had rolled into a corner)
loses its ruby and the eye which was so lustrous shines no more.
‘Nothing remains of all these Princes’, Orlando would say, indulging
in some pardonable exaggeration of their rank, ‘except one digit,’
and he would take a skeleton hand in his and bend the joints this
way and that. ‘Whose hand was it?’ he went on to ask. ‘The right or
the left? The hand of man or woman, of age or youth? Had it urged
the war-horse, or plied the needle? Had it plucked the rose, or
grasped cold steel? Had it−’ but here either his invention failed him
or, what is more likely, provided him with so many instances of
what a hand can do that he shrank, as his wont was, from the
cardinal labour of composition, which is excision, and he put it with
the other bones, thinking how there was a writer called Thomas
Browne,5 a Doctor of Norwich, whose writing upon such subjects
took his fancy amazingly.
So, taking his lantern and seeing that the bones were in order, for
though romantic, he was singularly methodical and detested nothing
so much as a ball of string on the oor, let alone the skull of an
ancestor, he returned to that curious, moody pacing down the
galleries, looking for something among the pictures, which was
interrupted at length by a veritable spasm of sobbing, at the sight of
a Dutch snow scene by an unknown artist. Then it seemed to him
that life was not worth living any more. Forgetting the bones of his
ancestors and how life is founded on a grave, he stood there shaken
with sobs, all for the desire of a woman in Russian trousers, with
slanting eyes, a pouting mouth, and pearls about her neck. She had
gone. She had left him. He was never to see her again. And so he
sobbed. And so he found his way back to his own rooms; and Mrs.
Grimsditch, seeing the light in the window, put the tankard from
her lips and said Praise be to God, his Lordship was safe in his room
again; for she had been thinking all this while that he was foully
murdered.
Orlando now drew his chair up to the table; opened the works of
Sir Thomas Browne and proceeded to investigate the delicate
articulation of one of the doctor’s longest and most marvellously
contorted cogitations.
For though these are not matters on which a biographer can
pro tably enlarge it is plain enough to those who have done a
reader’s part in making up from bare hints dropped here and there
the whole boundary and circumference of a living person; can hear
in what we only whisper a living voice; can see, often when we say
nothing about it, exactly what he looked like; know without a word
to guide them precisely what he thought — and it is for readers
such as these that we write — it is plain then to such a reader that
Orlando was strangely compounded of many humours — of
melancholy, of indolence, of passion, of love of solitude, to say
nothing of all those contortions and subtleties of temper which were
indicated on the rst page, when he slashed at a dead nigger’s head;
cut it down; hung it chivalrously out of his reach again and then
betook himself to the window-seat with a book. The taste for books
was an early one. As a child he was sometimes found at midnight by
a page still reading. They took his taper away, and he bred glow-
worms to serve his purpose. They took the glow-worms away, and
he almost burnt the house down with a tinder. To put it in a
nutshell, leaving the novelist to smooth out the crumpled silk and
all its implications, he was a nobleman a icted with a love of
literature. Many people of his time, still more of his rank, escaped
the infection and were thus free to run or ride or make love at their
own sweet will. But some were early infected by a germ said to be
bred of the pollen of the asphodel6 and to be blown out of Greece
and Italy, which was of so deadly a nature that it would shake the
hand as it was raised to strike, cloud the eye as it sought its prey,
and make the tongue stammer as it declared its love. It was the fatal
nature of this disease to substitute a phantom for reality, so that
Orlando, to whom fortune had given every gift — plate, linen,
houses, men-servants, carpets, beds in profusion — had only to open
a book for the whole vast accumulation to turn to mist. The nine
acres of stone which were his house vanished; one hundred and fty
indoor servants disappeared; his eighty riding horses became
invisible; it would take too long to count the carpets, sofas,
trappings, china, plate, cruets, cha ng dishes and other movables
often of beaten gold,7 which evaporated like so much sea mist under
the miasma. So it was, and Orlando would sit by himself, reading, a
naked man.
The disease gained rapidly upon him now in his solitude. He
would read often six hours into the night; and when they came to
him for orders about the slaughtering of cattle or the harvesting of
wheat, he would push away his folio and look as if he did not
understand what was said to him. This was bad enough and wrung
the hearts of Hall, the falconer, of Giles, the groom, of Mrs.
Grimsditch, the housekeeper, of Mr. Dupper, the chaplain. A ne
gentleman like that, they said, had no need of books. Let him leave
books, they said, to the palsied or the dying. But worse was to come.
For once the disease of reading has laid hold upon the system it
weakens it so that it falls an easy prey to that other scourge which
dwells in the inkpot and festers in the quill. The wretch takes to
writing. And while this is bad enough in a poor man, whose only
property is a chair and a table set beneath a leaky roof — for he has
not much to lose, after all — the plight of a rich man, who has
houses and cattle, maid-servants, asses and linen, and yet writes
books, is pitiable in the extreme. The avour of it all goes out of
him; he is riddled by hot irons; gnawed by vermin. He would give
every penny he has (such is the malignity of the germ) to write one
little book and become famous; yet all the gold in Peru will not buy
him the treasure of a well-turned line. So he falls into consumption
and sickness, blows his brains out, turns his face to the wall. It
matters not in what attitude they nd him. He has passed through
the gates of Death and known the ames of Hell.
Happily, Orlando was of a strong constitution and the disease (for
reasons presently to be given) never broke him down as it has
broken many of his peers. But he was deeply smitten with it, as the
sequel shows. For when he had read for an hour or so in Sir Thomas
Browne, and the bark of the stag and the call of the night watchman
showed that it was the dead of night and all safe asleep, he crossed
the room, took a silver key from his pocket and unlocked the doors
of a great inlaid cabinet which stood in the corner. Within were
some fty drawers of cedar wood8 and upon each was a paper
neatly written in Orlando’s hand. He paused, as if hesitating which
to open. One was inscribed ‘The Death of Ajax’, another ‘The Birth
of Pyramus’, another ‘Iphigenia in Aulis’, another ‘The Death of
Hippolytus’, another ‘Meleager’, another ‘The Return of Odysseus’ —
in fact there was scarcely a single drawer that lacked the name of
some mythological personage at a crisis of his career. In each
drawer lay a document of considerable size all written over in
Orlando’s hand. The truth was that Orlando had been a icted thus
for many years. Never had any boy begged apples as Orlando
begged paper; nor sweetmeats as he begged ink. Stealing away from
talk and games, he had hidden himself behind curtains, in priest’s
holes, or in the cupboard behind his mother’s bedroom which had a
great hole in the oor and smelt horribly of starling’s dung, with an
inkhorn in one hand, a pen in another, and on his knee a roll of
paper. Thus had been written, before he was turned twenty- ve,
some forty-seven plays, histories, romances, poems; some in prose,
some in verse; some in French, some in Italian; all romantic, and all
long. One he had had printed by John Ball of the Feathers and
Coronet opposite St. Paul’s Cross, Cheapside; but though the sight of
it gave him extreme delight, he had never dared show it even to his
mother, since to write, much more to publish, was, he knew, for a
nobleman an inexpiable disgrace.
Now, however, that it was the dead of night and he was alone, he
chose from this repository one thick document called ‘Xenophila a
Tragedy’ or some such title, and one thin one, called simply ‘The
Oak Tree’ (this was the only monosyllabic title among the lot), and
then he approached the inkhorn, ngered the quill, and made other
such passes as those addicted to this vice begin their rites with. But
he paused.
As this pause was of extreme signi cance in his history, more so,
indeed, than many acts which bring men to their knees and make
rivers run with blood, it behoves us to ask why he paused; and to
reply, after due re ection, that it was for some such reason as this.
Nature, who has played so many queer tricks upon us, making us so
unequally of clay and diamonds, of rainbow and granite,9 and
stu ed them into a case, often of the most incongruous, for the poet
has a butcher’s face and the butcher a poet’s; nature, who delights in
muddle and mystery, so that even now (the rst of November 1927)
we know not why we go upstairs, or why we come down again, our
most daily movements are like the passage of a ship on an unknown
sea, and the sailors at the mast-head ask, pointing their glasses to
the horizon; Is there land or is there none? to which, if we are
prophets, we make answer ‘Yes’; if we are truthful we say ‘No’;
nature, who has so much to answer for besides the perhaps
unwieldy length of this sentence, has further complicated her task
and added to our confusion by providing not only a perfect rag-bag
of odds and ends within us — a piece of a policeman’s trousers lying
cheek by jowl with Queen Alexandra’s wedding veil — but has
contrived that the whole assortment shall be lightly stitched
together by a single thread. Memory is the seamstress, and a
capricious one at that. Memory runs her needle in and out, up and
down, hither and thither. We know not what comes next, or what
follows after. Thus, the most ordinary movement in the world, such
as sitting down at a table and pulling the inkstand towards one, may
agitate a thousand odd, disconnected fragments, now bright, now
dim, hanging and bobbing and dipping and aunting, like the
underlinen of a family of fourteen on a line in a gale of wind.
Instead of being a single, downright, blu piece of work of which no
man need feel ashamed, our commonest deeds are set about with a
uttering and ickering of wings, a rising and falling of lights. Thus
it was that Orlando, dipping his pen in the ink, saw the mocking
face of the lost Princess and asked himself a million questions
instantly which were as arrows dipped in gall. Where was she; and
why had she left him? Was the Ambassador her uncle or her lover?
Had they plotted? Was she forced? Was she married? Was she dead?
— all of which so drove their venom into him that, as if to vent his
agony somewhere, he plunged his quill so deep into the inkhorn
that the ink spirted over the table, which act, explain it how one
may (and no explanation perhaps is possible — Memory is
inexplicable), at once substituted for the face of the Princess a face
of a very di erent sort. But whose was it, he asked himself? And he
had to wait, perhaps half a minute, looking at the new picture
which lay on top of the old, as one lantern slide is half seen through
the next, before he could say to himself, ‘This is the face of that
rather fat, shabby man who sat in Twitchett’s room10 ever so many
years ago when old Queen Bess came here to dine; and I saw him,’
Orlando continued, catching at another of those little coloured rags,
‘sitting at the table, as I peeped in on my way downstairs, and he
had the most amazing eyes,’ said Orlando, ‘that ever were, but who
the devil was he?’ Orlando asked, for here Memory added to the
forehead and eyes, rst, a coarse, grease-stained ru e, then a
brown doublet, and nally a pair of thick boots such as citizens
wear in Cheapside. ‘Not a Nobleman; not one of us,’ said Orlando
(which he would not have said aloud, for he was the most courteous
of gentlemen; but it shows what an e ect noble birth has upon the
mind and incidentally how di cult it is for a nobleman to be a
writer11 ), ‘a poet, I dare say.’ By all the laws, Memory, having
disturbed him su ciently, should now have blotted the whole thing
out completely, or have fetched up something so idiotic and out of
keeping — like a dog chasing a cat or an old woman blowing her
nose into a red cotton handkerchief — that, in despair of keeping
pace with her vagaries, Orlando should have struck his pen in
earnest against his paper. (For we can, if we have the resolution,
turn the hussy, Memory, and all her ragtag and bobtail out of the
house.) But Orlando paused. Memory still held before him the image
of a shabby man with big, bright eyes. Still he looked, still he
paused. It is these pauses that are our undoing. It is then that
sedition enters the fortress and our troops rise in insurrection. Once
before he had paused, and love with its horrid rout, its shawms, its
cymbals, and its heads with gory locks torn from the shoulders had
burst in.12 From love he had su ered the tortures of the damned.
Now, again, he paused, and into the breach thus made, leapt
Ambition, the harridan, and Poetry, the witch, and Desire of Fame,
the strumpet; all joined hands and made of his heart their dancing
ground. Standing upright in the solitude of his room, he vowed that
he would be the rst poet of his race and bring immortal lustre
upon his name. He said (reciting the names and exploits of his
ancestors) that Sir Boris had fought and killed the Paynim; Sir
Gawain, the Turk; Sir Miles, the Pole; Sir Andrew, the Frank; Sir
Richard, the Austrian; Sir Jordan, the Frenchman; and Sir Herbert,
the Spaniard.13 But of all that killing and campaigning, that
drinking and love-making, that spending and hunting and riding and
eating, what remained? A skull; a nger. Whereas, he said, turning
to the page of Sir Thomas Browne, which lay open upon the table —
and again he paused. Like an incantation rising from all parts of the
room, from the night wind and the moonlight, rolled the divine
melody of those words which, lest they should outstare this page,
we will leave where they lie entombed, not dead, embalmed rather,
so fresh is their colour, so sound their breathing — and Orlando,
comparing that achievement with those of his ancestors, cried out
that they and their deeds were dust and ashes, but this man and his
words were immortal.
He soon perceived, however, that the battles which Sir Miles and
the rest had waged against armed knights to win a kingdom, were
not half so arduous as this which he now undertook to win
immortality against the English language. Anyone moderately
familiar with the rigours of composition will not need to be told the
story in detail; how he wrote and it seemed good; read and it
seemed vile; corrected and tore up; cut out; put in; was in ecstasy; in
despair; had his good nights and bad mornings; snatched at ideas
and lost them; saw his book plain before him and it vanished; acted
his people’s parts as he ate; mouthed them as he walked; now cried;
now laughed; vacillated between this style and that; now preferred
the heroic and pompous; next the plain and simple; now the vales of
Tempe;14 then the elds of Kent or Cornwall; and could not decide
whether he was the divinest genius or the greatest fool in the world.
It was to settle this last question that he decided, after many
months of such feverish labour, to break the solitude of years and
communicate with the outer world. He had a friend in London, one
Giles Isham of Norfolk,15 who, though of gentle birth, was
acquainted with writers and could doubtless put him in touch with
some member of that blessed, indeed sacred, fraternity. For, to
Orlando in the state he was now in, there was a glory about a man
who had written a book and had it printed, which outshone all the
glories of blood and state.16 To his imagination it seemed as if even
the bodies of those instinct with such divine thoughts must be
trans gured. They must have aureoles for hair, incense for breath,
and roses must grow between their lips — which was certainly not
true either of himself or Mr. Dupper. He could think of no greater
happiness than to be allowed to sit behind a curtain and hear them
talk. Even the imagination of that bold and various discourse made
the memory of what he and his courtier friends used to talk about
— a dog, a horse, a woman, a game of cards — seem brutish in the
extreme. He bethought him with pride that he had always been
called a scholar, and sneered at for his love of solitude and books.
He had never been apt at pretty phrases. He would stand stock still,
blush, and stride like a grenadier in a ladies’ drawing-room. He had
twice fallen, in sheer abstraction, from his horse. He had broken
Lady Winchilsea’s fan17 once while making a rhyme. Eagerly
recalling these and other instances of his un tness for the life of
society, an ine able hope, that all the turbulence of his youth, his
clumsiness, his blushes, his long walks, and his love of the country
proved that he himself belonged to the sacred race rather than to
the noble — was by birth a writer, rather than an aristocrat —
possessed him. For the rst time since the night of the great ood he
was happy.
He now commissioned Mr. Isham of Norfolk to deliver to Mr.
Nicholas Greene of Cli ord’s Inn18 a document which set forth
Orlando’s admiration for his works (for Nick Greene was a very
famous writer at that time) and his desire to make his acquaintance;
which he scarcely dared ask; for he had nothing to o er in return;
but if Mr. Nicholas Greene would condescend to visit him, a coach
and four would be at the corner of Fetter Lane at whatever hour Mr.
Greene chose to appoint, and bring him safely to Orlando’s house.
One may ll up the phrases which then followed; and gure
Orlando’s delight when, in no long time, Mr. Greene signi ed his
acceptance of the Noble Lord’s invitation; took his place in the
coach and was set down in the hall to the south of the main building
punctually at seven o’clock on Monday, April the twenty- rst.
Many Kings, Queens, and Ambassadors had been received there;
Judges had stood there in their ermine. The loveliest ladies of the
land had come there; and the sternest warriors. Banners hung there
which had been at Flodden and at Agin-court.19 There were
displayed the painted coats of arms with their lions and their
leopards and their coronets. There were the long tables where the
gold and silver plate was stood; and there the vast replaces of
wrought Italian marble where nightly a whole oak tree, with its
million leaves and its nests of rook and wren, was burnt to ashes.
Nicholas Greene, the poet stood there now, plainly dressed in his
slouched hat and black doublet, carrying in one hand a small bag.
That Orlando as he hastened to greet him was slightly
disappointed was inevitable. The poet was not above middle height;
was of a mean gure; was lean and stooped somewhat, and,
stumbling over the masti on entering, the dog bit him. Moreover,
Orlando for all his knowledge of mankind was puzzled where to
place him. There was something about him which belonged neither
to servant, squire, or noble. The head with its rounded forehead and
beaked nose was ne, but the chin receded. The eyes were brilliant,
but the lips hung loose and slobbered. It was the expression of the
face as a whole, however, that was disquieting. There was none of
that stately composure which makes the faces of the nobility so
pleasing to look at; nor had it anything of the digni ed servility of a
well-trained domestic’s face; it was a face seamed, puckered, and
drawn together. Poet though he was, it seemed as if he were more
used to scold than to atter; to quarrel than to coo; to scramble than
to ride; to struggle than to rest; to hate than to love. This, too, was
shown by the quickness of his movements; and by something ery
and suspicious in his glance. Orlando was somewhat taken aback.
But they went to dinner.
Here, Orlando, who usually took such things for granted, was, for
the rst time, unaccountably ashamed of the number of his servants
and of the splendour of his table. Stranger still, he bethought him
with pride — for the thought was generally distasteful — of that
great grandmother Moll who had milked the cows. He was about
somehow to allude to this humble woman and her milk-pails, when
the poet forestalled him by saying that it was odd, seeing how
common the name of Greene was, that the family had come over
with the Conqueror and was of the highest nobility in France.
Unfortunately, they had come down in the world and done little
more than leave their name to the royal borough of Greenwich.
Further talk of the same sort, about lost castles, coats of arms,
cousins who were baronets in the north, intermarriage with noble
families in the west, how some Greens spelt the name with an e at
the end, and others without, lasted till the venison was on the table.
Then Orlando contrived to say something of Grandmother Moll and
her cows, and had eased his heart a little of its burden by the time
the wild fowl were before them. But it was not until the Malmsey20
was passing freely that Orlando dared mention what he could not
help thinking a more important matter than the Greens or the cows;
that is to say the sacred subject of poetry. At the rst mention of the
word, the poet’s eyes ashed re; he dropped the ne gentleman
airs he had worn; thumped his glass on the table, and launched into
one of the longest, most intricate, most passionate, and bitterest
stories that Orlando had ever heard, save from the lips of a jilted
woman, about a play of his; another poet; and a critic. Of the nature
of poetry itself, Orlando only gathered that it was harder to sell than
prose, and though the lines were shorter took longer in the writing.
So the talk went on with rami cations interminable, until Orlando
ventured to hint that he had himself been so rash as to write — but
here the poet leapt from his chair. A mouse had squeaked in the
wainscot, he said. The truth was, he explained, that his nerves were
in a state where a mouse’s squeak upset them for a fortnight.
Doubtless the house was full of vermin, but Orlando had not heard
them. The poet then gave Orlando the full story of his health for the
past ten years or so. It had been so bad that one could only marvel
that he still lived. He had had the palsy, the gout, the ague, the
dropsy, and the three sorts of fever in succession; added to which he
had an enlarged heart, a great spleen, and a diseased liver. But,
above all, he had, he told Orlando, sensations in his spine which
de ed description. There was one knob about the third from the top
which burnt like re; another about the second from the bottom
which was cold as ice. Sometimes he woke with a brain like lead; at
others it was as if a thousand wax tapers were alight and people
were throwing reworks inside him. He could feel a rose leaf
through his mattress, he said; and knew his way almost about
London by the feel of the cobbles. Altogether he was a piece of
machinery so nely made and so curiously put together (here he
raised his hand as if unconsciously, and indeed it was of the nest
shape imaginable) that it confounded him to think that he had only
sold ve hundred copies of his poem, but that of course was largely
due to the conspiracy against him. All he could say, he concluded,
banging his st upon the table, was that the art of poetry was dead
in England.
How that could be with Shakespeare, Marlowe, Ben Jonson,
Browne, Donne,21 all now writing or just having written, Orlando,
reeling o the names of his favourite heroes, could not think.
Greene laughed sardonically. Shakespeare, he admitted, had
written some scenes that were well enough; but he had taken them
chie y from Marlowe. Marlowe was a likely boy, but what could
you say of a lad who died before he was thirty? As for Browne, he
was for writing poetry in prose, and people soon got tired of such
conceits as that. Donne was a mountebank who wrapped up his lack
of meaning in hard words. The gulls were taken in; but the style
would be out of fashion twelve months hence. As for Ben Jonson —
Ben Jonson was a friend of his and he never spoke ill of his friends.
No, he concluded, the great age of literature is past; the great age
of literature was the Greek; the Elizabethan age was inferior in
every respect to the Greek. In such ages men cherished a divine
ambition which he might call La Gloire22 (he pronounced it Glawr,
so that Orlando did not at rst catch his meaning). Now all young
writers were in the pay of the booksellers and poured out any trash
that would sell. Shakespeare was the chief o ender in this way and
Shakespeare was already paying the penalty. Their own age, he said,
was marked by precious conceits and wild experiments — neither of
which the Greeks would have tolerated for a moment. Much though
it hurt him to say it — for he loved literature as he loved his life —
he could see no good in the present and had no hope of the future.
Here he poured himself out another glass of wine.
Orlando was shocked by these doctrines; yet could not help
observing that the critic himself seemed by no means downcast. On
the contrary, the more he denounced his own time, the more
complacent he became. He could remember, he said, a night at the
Cock Tavern in Fleet Street23 when Kit Marlowe was there and some
others. Kit was in high feather, rather drunk, which he easily
became, and in a mood to say silly things. He could see him now,
brandishing his glass at the company and hiccoughing out, ‘Stap my
vitals, Bill’ (this was to Shakespeare), ‘there’s a great wave coming
and you’re on the top of it,’ by which he meant, Greene explained,
that they were trembling on the verge of a great age in English
literature, and that Shakespeare was to be a poet of some
importance. Happily for himself, he was killed two nights later in a
drunken brawl, and so did not live to see how this prediction turned
out. ‘Poor foolish fellow,’ said Greene, ‘to go and say a thing like
that. A great age, forsooth — the Elizabethan a great age!’
‘So, my dear Lord,’ he continued, settling himself comfortably in
his chair and rubbing the wine-glass between his ngers, ‘we must
make the best of it, cherish the past and honour those writers —
there are still a few left of ’em — who take antiquity for their model
and write, not for pay but for Glawr.’ (Orlando could have wished
him a better accent.) ‘Glawr’, said Greene, ‘is the spur of noble
minds. Had I a pension of three hundred pounds a year paid
quarterly, I would live for Glawr alone. I would lie in bed every
morning reading Cicero.24 I would imitate his style so that you
couldn’t tell the di erence between us. That’s what I call ne
writing,’ said Greene; ‘that’s what I call Glawr. But it’s necessary to
have a pension to do it.’
By this time Orlando had abandoned all hope of discussing his
own work with the poet; but this mattered the less as the talk now
got upon the lives and characters of Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and
the rest, all of whom Greene had known intimately and about whom
he had a thousand anecdotes of the most amusing kind to tell.
Orlando had never laughed so much in his life. These, then, were his
gods! Half were drunken and all were amorous. Most of them
quarrelled with their wives; not one of them was above a lie or an
intrigue of the most paltry kind. Their poetry was scribbled down on
the backs of washing bills held to the heads of printer’s devils at the
street door. Thus Hamlet went to press; thus Lear; thus Othello. No
wonder, as Greene said, that these plays show the faults they do.
The rest of the time was spent in carousings and junketings in
taverns and in beer gardens, when things were said that passed
belief for wit, and things were done that made the utmost frolic of
the courtiers seem pale in comparison. 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
nest things of books provided they were written three hundred
years ago.25
So time passed, and Orlando felt for his guest a strange mixture of
liking and contempt, of admiration and pity, as well as some-thing
too inde nite to be called by any one name, but had something of
fear in it and something of fascination. He talked incessantly about
himself, yet was such good company that one could listen to the
story of his ague for ever. Then he was so witty; then he was so
irreverent; then he made so free with the names of God and Woman;
then he was so full of queer crafts and had such strange lore in his
head; could make salad in three hundred di erent ways; knew all
that could be known of the mixing of wines; played half-a-dozen
musical instruments, and was the rst person, and perhaps the last,
to toast cheese in the great Italian replace. That he did not know a
geranium from a carnation, an oak from a birch tree, a masti from
a greyhound, a teg from a ewe,26 wheat from barley, plough land
from fallow; was ignorant of the rotation of the crops; thought
oranges grew under ground and turnips on trees; preferred any
townscape to any landscape — all this and much more amazed
Orlando, who had never met anybody of his kind before. Even the
maids, who despised him, tittered at his jokes, and the men-
servants, who loathed him, hung about to hear his stories. Indeed,
the house had never been so lively as now that he was there — all
of which gave Orlando a great deal to think about, and caused him
to compare this way of life with the old. He recalled the sort of talk
he had been used to about the King of Spain’s apoplexy or the
mating of a bitch; he bethought him how the day passed between
the stables and the dressing closet; he remembered how the Lords
snored over their wine and hated anybody who woke them up. He
bethought him how active and valiant they were in body; how
slothful and timid in mind. Worried by these thoughts, and unable
to strike a proper balance, he came to the conclusion that he had
admitted to his house a plaguey spirit of unrest that would never
su er him to sleep sound again.
At the same moment, Nick Greene came to precisely the opposite
conclusion. Lying in bed of a morning on the softest pillows between
the smoothest sheets and looking out of his oriel window upon turf
which for three centuries had known neither dandelion nor dock
weed, he thought that unless he could somehow make his escape, he
should be smothered alive. Getting up and hearing the pigeons coo,
dressing and hearing the fountains fall, he thought that unless he
could hear the drays roar upon the cobbles of Fleet Street, he would
never write another line. If this goes on much longer, he thought,
hearing the footman mend the re and spread the table with silver
dishes next door, I shall fall asleep and (here he gave a prodigious
yawn) sleeping die.
So he sought Orlando in his room, and explained that he had not
been able to sleep a wink all night because of the silence. (Indeed,
the house was surrounded by a park fteen miles in circumference
and a wall ten feet high.) Silence, he said, was of all things the most
oppressive to his nerves. He would end his visit, by Orlando’s leave,
that very morning. Orlando felt some relief at this, yet also a great
reluctance to let him go. The house, he thought, would seem very
dull without him. On parting (for he had never yet liked to mention
the subject), he had the temerity to press his play upon the Death of
Hercules upon the poet and ask his opinion of it. The poet took it;
muttered something about Glawr and Cicero, which Orlando cut
short by promising to pay the pension quarterly; whereupon Greene,
with many protestations of a ection, jumped into the coach and was
gone.
The great hall had never seemed so large, so splendid, or so empty
as the chariot rolled away. Orlando knew that he would never have
the heart to make toasted cheese in the Italian replace again. He
would never have the wit to crack jokes about Italian pictures; never
have the skill to mix punch as it should be mixed; a thousand good
quips and cranks would be lost to him. Yet what a relief to be out of
the sound of that querulous voice, what a luxury to be alone once
more, so he could not help re ecting, as he unloosed the masti
which had been tied up these six weeks because it never saw the
poet without biting him.
Nick Greene was set down at the corner of Fetter Lane that same
afternoon, and found things going on much as he had left them.
Mrs. Greene, that is to say, was giving birth to a baby in one room;
Tom Fletcher was drinking gin in another. Books were tumbled all
about the oor; dinner — such as it was — was set on a dressing-
table where the children had been making mud pies. But this,
Greene felt, was the atmosphere for writing; here he could write,
and write he did. The subject was made for him. A noble Lord at
home. A visit to a Nobleman in the country — his new poem was to
have some such title as that. Seizing the pen with which his little
boy was tickling the cat’s ears, and dipping it in the egg-cup which
served for inkpot, Greene dashed o a very spirited satire there and
then. It was so done to a turn that no one could doubt that the
young Lord who was roasted was Orlando; his most private sayings
and doings, his enthusiasms and follies, down to the very colour of
his hair and the foreign way he had of rolling his r’s, were there to
the life. And if there had been any doubt about it, Greene clinched
the matter by introducing, with scarcely any disguise, passages from
that aristocratic tragedy, the Death of Hercules, which he found as
he expected, wordy and bombastic in the extreme.
The pamphlet, which ran at once into several editions, and paid
the expenses of Mrs. Greene’s tenth lying-in, was soon sent by
friends who take care of such matters to Orlando himself. When he
had read it, which he did with deadly composure from start to
 nish, he rang for the footman; delivered the document to him at
the end of a pair of tongs; bade him drop it in the lthiest heart of
the foulest midden on the estate. Then, when the man was turning
to go he stopped him, ‘Take the swiftest horse in the stable,’ he said,
‘ride for dear life to Harwich. There embark upon a ship which you
will nd bound for Norway. Buy for me from the King’s own kennels
the nest elk-hounds 27 of the Royal strain, male and female. Bring
them back without delay. For’, he murmured, scarcely above his
breath as he turned to his books, ‘I have done with men.’
The footman, who was perfectly trained in his duties, bowed and
disappeared. He ful lled his task so e ciently that he was back that
day three weeks, leading in his hand a leash of the nest elk-
hounds, one of whom, a female, gave birth that very night under the
dinner-table to a litter of eight ne puppies. Orlando had them
brought to his bed-chamber.

‘For’, he said, ‘I have done with men.’

Nevertheless, he paid the pension quarterly.

Thus, at the age of thirty, or thereabouts, this young Nobleman had

not only had every experience that life has to o er, but had seen the
worthlessness of them all. Love and ambition, women and poets
were all equally vain. Literature was a farce. The night after reading
Greene’s Visit to a Nobleman in the Country, he burnt in a great
con agration fty-seven poetical works, only retaining ‘The Oak
Tree’, which was his boyish dream and very short. Two things alone
remained to him in which he now put any trust: dogs and nature; an
elk-hound and a rose bush. The world, in all its variety, life in all its
complexity, had shrunk to that. Dogs and a bush were the whole of
it. So feeling quit of a vast mountain of illusion, and very naked in
consequence, he called his hounds to him and strode through the
Park.
So long had he been secluded, writing and reading, that he had
half forgotten the amenities of nature, which in June can be great.
When he reached that high mound whence on ne days half of
England with a slice of Wales and Scotland thrown in can be seen,
he ung himself under his favourite oak tree and felt that if he need
never speak to another man or woman so long as he lived; if his
dogs did not develop the faculty of speech; if he never met a poet or
a Princess again, he might make out what years remained to him in
tolerable content.
Here he came then, day after day, week after week, month after
month, year after year. 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 rst 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 rst a storm and then ne weather;
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’28 (here the exact amount could
be indicated in brackets) and nothing whatever happened.
But Time, unfortunately, though it makes animals and vegetables
bloom and fade with amazing punctuality, has no such simple e ect
upon the mind of man. The mind of man, moreover, works with
equal strangeness upon the body of time. An hour, once it lodges in
the queer element of the human spirit, may be stretched to fty or a
hundred times its clock length; on the other hand, an hour may be
accurately represented on the timepiece of the mind by one second.
This extraordinary discrepancy between time on the clock and time
in the mind is less known than it should be and deserves fuller
investigation. But the biographer, whose interests are, as we have
said, highly restricted, must con ne himself to one simple
statement: when a man has reached the age of thirty, as Orlando
now had, time when he is thinking becomes inordinately long; time
when he is doing becomes inordinately short. Thus Orlando gave his
orders and did the business of his vast estates in a ash; but directly
he was alone on the mound under the oak tree, the seconds began to
round and ll until it seemed as if they would never fall. They lled
themselves, moreover, with the strangest variety of objects. For not
only did he nd himself confronted by problems which have puzzled
the wisest of men, such as What is love? What friendship? What
truth? but directly he came to think about them, his whole past,
which seemed to him of extreme length and variety, rushed into the
falling second, swelled it a dozen times its natural size, coloured it a
thousand tints, and lled it with all the odds and ends in the
universe.
In such thinking (or by whatever name it should be called) he
spent months and years of his life. It would be no exaggeration to
say that he would go out after breakfast a man of thirty and come
home to dinner a man of fty- ve at least. Some weeks added a
century to his age, others no more than three seconds at most.
Altogether, the task of estimating the length of human life (of the
animals’ we presume not to speak) is beyond our capacity, for
directly we say that it is ages long, we are reminded that it is briefer
than the fall of a rose leaf to the ground. Of the two forces which
alternately, and what is more confusing still, at the same moment,
dominate our unfortunate numbskulls — brevity and diuturnity —
Orlando was sometimes under the in uence of the elephant-footed
deity, then of the gnat-winged y. Life seemed to him of prodigious
length. Yet even so, it went like a ash. But even when it stretched
longest and the moments swelled biggest and he seemed to wander
alone in deserts of vast eternity,29 there was no time for the
smoothing out and deciphering of those thickly scored parchments
which thirty years among men and women had rolled tight in his
heart and brain. Long before he had done thinking about Love (the
oak tree had put forth its leaves and shaken them to the ground a
dozen times in the process) Ambition would jostle it o the eld, to
be replaced by Friendship or Literature. And as the rst question
had not been settled — What is Love? — back it would come at the
least provocation or none, and hustle Books or Metaphors or What
one lives for into the margin, there to wait till they saw their chance
to rush into the eld again. What made the process still longer was
that it was profusely illustrated, not only with pictures, as that of
old Queen Elizabeth, laid on her tapestry couch in rose-coloured
brocade with an ivory snu -box in her hand and a gold-hilted sword
by her side, but with scents — she was strongly perfumed — and
with sounds; the stags were barking in Richmond Park that winter’s
day. And so, the thought of love would be all ambered over with
snow and winter; with log res burning; with Russian women, gold
swords, and the bark of stags; with old King James’ slobbering and
reworks and sacks of treasure in the holds of Elizabethan sailing
ships. Every single thing, once he tried to dislodge it from its place
in his mind, he found thus cumbered with other matter like the
lump of glass which, after a year at the bottom of the sea, is grown
about with bones and dragon- ies, and coins and the tresses of
drowned women.
‘Another metaphor by Jupiter!’ he would exclaim as he said this
(which will show the disorderly and circuitous way in which his
mind worked and explain why the oak tree owered and faded so
often before he came to any conclusion about Love). ‘And what’s the
point of it?’ he would ask himself. ‘Why not say simply in so many
words—’ and then he would try to think for half an hour — or was
it two years and a half? — how to say simply in so many words
what love is. ‘A gure like that is manifestly untruthful,’ he argued,
‘for no dragon- y, unless under very exceptional circumstances,
could live at the bottom of the sea. And if literature is not the Bride
and Bedfellow of Truth, what is she? Confound it all,’ he cried, ‘why
say Bedfellow when one’s already said Bride? Why not simply say
what one means and leave it?’
So then he tried saying the grass is green and the sky is blue and
so to propitiate the austere spirit of poetry whom still, though at a
great distance, he could not help reverencing. ‘The sky is blue,’ he
said, ‘the grass is green.’ Looking up, he saw that, on the contrary,
the sky is like the veils which a thousand Madonnas have let fall
from their hair; and the grass eets30 and darkens like a ight of
girls eeing the embraces of hairy satyrs from enchanted woods.
‘Upon my word,’ he said (for he had fallen into the bad habit of
speaking aloud), ‘I don’t see that one’s more true than another. Both
are utterly false.’ And he despaired of being able to solve the
problem of what poetry is and what truth is and fell into a deep
dejection.
And here we may pro t by a pause in his soliloquy to re ect how
odd it was to see Orlando stretched there on his elbow on a June
day and to re ect that this ne fellow with all his faculties about
him and a healthy body, witness cheeks and limbs — a man who
never thought twice about heading a charge or ghting a duel —
should be so subject to the lethargy of thought, and rendered so
susceptible by it, that when it came to a question of poetry, or his
own competence in it, he was as shy as a little girl behind her
mother’s cottage door. In our belief, Greene’s ridicule of his tragedy
hurt him as much as the Princess’ ridicule of his love. But to return
—
 Orlando went on thinking. He kept looking at the grass and at the
sky and trying to bethink him what a true poet, who has his verses
published in London, would say about them. Memory meanwhile
(whose habits have already been described) kept steady before his
eyes the face of Nicholas Greene, as if that sardonic loose-lipped
man, treacherous as he had proved himself, were the Muse in
person, and it was to him that Orlando must do homage. So
Orlando, that summer morning, o ered him a variety of phrases,
some plain, others gured, and Nick Greene kept shaking his head
and sneering and muttering something about Glawr and Cicero and
the death of poetry in our time. At length, starting to his feet (it was
now winter and very cold) Orlando swore one of the most
remarkable oaths of his lifetime, for it bound him to a servitude
than which none is stricter. ‘I’ll be blasted’, he said, ‘if I ever write
another word, or try to write another word, to please Nick Greene
or the Muse. Bad, good, or indi erent, I’ll write, from this day
forward, to please myself’; and here he made as if he were tearing a
whole budget31 of papers across and tossing them in the face of that
sneering loose-lipped man. Upon which, as a cur ducks if you stoop
to shy a stone at him, Memory ducked her e gy of Nick Greene out
of sight; and substituted for it — nothing whatever.
But Orlando, all the same, went on thinking. He had indeed much
to think of. For when he tore the parchment across, he tore, in one
rending, the scrolloping,32 emblazoned scroll which he had made
out in his own favour in the solitude of his room appointing himself,
as the King appoints Ambassadors, the rst poet of his race, the rst
writer of his age, conferring eternal immortality upon his soul and
granting his body a grave among laurels and the intangible banners
of a people’s reverence perpetually. Eloquent as this all was, he now
tore it up and threw it in the dust-bin. ‘Fame’, he said, ‘is like’ (and
since there was no Nick Greene to stop him, he went on to revel in
images of which we will choose only one or two of the quietest) ‘a
braided coat which hampers the limbs; a jacket of silver which curbs
the heart; a painted shield which covers a scarecrow,’ etc. etc. The
pith of his phrases was that while fame impedes and constricts,
obscurity wraps about a man like a mist; obscurity is dark, ample,
and free; obscurity lets the mind take its way unimpeded. Over the
obscure man is poured the merciful su usion of darkness. None
knows where he goes or comes. He may seek the truth and speak it;
he alone is free; he alone is truthful; he alone is at peace. And so he
sank into a quiet mood, under the oak tree, the hardness of whose
roots, exposed above the ground, seemed to him rather comfortable
than otherwise.
Sunk for a long time in profound thoughts as to the value of
obscurity, and the delight of having no name, but being like a wave
which returns to the deep body of the sea; thinking how obscurity
rids the mind of the irk of envy and spite; how it sets running in the
veins the free waters of generosity and magnanimity; and allows
giving and taking without thanks o ered or praise given; which
must have been the way of all great poets, he supposed (though his
knowledge of Greek was not enough to bear him out), for, he
thought, Shakespeare must have written like that, and the church
builders built like that, anonymously, needing no thanking or
naming, but only their work in the daytime and a little ale perhaps
at night — ‘What an admirable life this is,’ he thought, stretching
his limbs out under the oak tree. ‘And why not enjoy it this very
moment?’ The thought struck him like a bullet. Ambition dropped
like a plummet. Rid of the heart-burn of rejected love, and of vanity
rebuked, and all the other stings and pricks which the nettle-bed of
life had burnt upon him when ambitious of fame, but could no
longer in ict upon one careless of glory, he opened his eyes, which
had been wide open all the time, but had seen only thoughts, and
saw, lying in the hollow beneath him, his house.
There it lay in the early sunshine of spring.33 It looked a town
rather than a house, but a town built, not hither and thither, as this
man wished or that, but circumspectly, by a single architect with
one idea in his head. Courts and buildings, grey, red, plum colour,
lay orderly and symmetrical; the courts were some of them oblong
and some square; in this was a fountain; in that a statue; the
buildings were some of them low, some pointed; here was a chapel,
there a belfry; spaces of the greenest grass lay in between and
clumps of cedar trees and beds of bright owers; all were clasped —
yet so well set out was it that it seemed that every part had room to
spread itself ttingly — by the roll of a massive wall; while smoke
from innumerable chimneys curled perpetually into the air. This
vast, yet ordered building, which could house a thousand men and
perhaps two thousand horses, was built, Orlando thought, by
workmen whose names are unknown. Here have lived, for more
centuries than I can count, the obscure generations of my own
obscure family. Not one of these Richards, Johns, Annes, Elizabeths
has left a token of himself behind him, yet all, working together
with their spades and their needles, their love-making and their
child-bearing, have left this.
Never had the house looked more noble and humane.
Why, then, had he wished to raise himself above them? For it
seemed vain and arrogant in the extreme to try to better that
anonymous work of creation; the labours of those vanished hands.
Better was it to go unknown and leave behind you an arch, a potting
shed, a wall where peaches ripen, than to burn like a meteor and
leave no dust. For after all, he said, kindling as he looked at the
great house on the greensward below, the unknown lords and ladies
who lived there never forgot to set aside something for those who
come after; for the roof that will leak; for the tree that will fall.
There was always a warm corner for the old shepherd in the
kitchen; always food for the hungry; always their goblets were
polished, though they lay sick; and their windows were lit though
they lay dying. Lords though they were, they were content to go
down into obscurity with the molecatcher and the stone-mason.
Obscure noblemen, forgotten builders — thus he apostrophised
them with a warmth that entirely gainsaid such critics as called him
cold, indi erent, slothful (the truth being that a quality often lies
just on the other side of the wall from where we seek it) — thus he
apostrophised his house and race in terms of the most moving
eloquence; but when it came to the peroration — and what is
eloquence that lacks a peroration? — he fumbled. He would have
liked to have ended with a ourish to the e ect that he would
follow in their foot-steps and add another stone to their building.
Since, however, the building already covered nine acres, to add
even a single stone seemed super uous. Could one mention
furniture in a peroration? Could one speak of chairs and tables and
mats to lie beside people’s beds? For whatever the peroration
wanted, that was what the house stood in need of. Leaving his
speech un nished for the moment, he strode down hill again
resolved henceforward to devote himself to the furnishing of the
mansion. The news — that she was to attend him instantly —
brought tears to the eyes of good old Mrs. Grimsditch, now grown
somewhat old. Together they perambulated the house.
The towel horse in the King’s bedroom (‘and that was King Jamie,
my Lord,’34 she said, hinting that it was many a day since a King
had slept under their roof; but the odious Parliament days were over
and there was now a Crown in England again) lacked a leg; there
were no stands to the ewers in the little closet leading into the
waiting room of the Duchess’s page; Mr. Greene had made a stain on
the carpet with his nasty pipe smoking, which she and Judy, for all
their scrubbing, had never been able to wash out. Indeed, when
Orlando came to reckon up the matter of furnishing with rosewood
chairs and cedar-wood cabinets, with silver basins, china bowls, and
Persian carpets, every one of the three hundred and sixty- ve
bedrooms35 which the house contained, he saw that it would be no
light one; and if some thousands of pounds of his estate remained
over, these would do little more than hang a few galleries with
tapestry, set the dining hall with ne, carved chairs and provide
mirrors of solid silver and chairs of the same metal (for which he
had an inordinate passion) for the furnishing of the royal bed-
chambers.
He now set to work in earnest, as we can prove beyond a doubt if
we look at his ledgers. Let us glance at an inventory of what he
bought at this time, with the expenses totted up in the margin —
but these we omit.

’To fty pairs of Spanish blankets, ditto curtains of crimson and

white ta eta; the valence to them of white satin embroidered
with crimson and white silk…

’To seventy yellow satin chairs and sixty stools, suitable with
their buckram covers to them all… sankuarsankuarsan
kuarsankua rsankuarsa nkuarsank uarsankuar sankuar
sankuarsa nkuarsankuar sankuarsankuars ankuarsa nkuar
sankua rsankua rsankuar sankuarsank uarsankuar sankuarsanku
arsankuar sankuarsankuarsankuarsankuar
sankuarsankuarsankuar sankuarsankuar sankuar

’To sixty-seven walnut tree tables…

’To seventeen dozen boxes containing each dozen ve dozen of

Venice glasses…

’To one hundred and two mats, each thirty yards long…
 ’To ninety-seven cushions of crimson damask laid with silver
parchment lace and footstools of cloth of tissue and chairs
suitable…

‘To fty branches for a dozen lights apiece…’

Already — it is an e ect lists have upon us — we are beginning to

yawn. But if we stop, it is only that the catalogue is tedious, not that
it is nished. There are ninety-nine pages more of it and the total
sum disbursed ran into many thousands — that is to say millions of
our money. And if his day was spent like this, at night again, Lord
Orlando might be found reckoning out what it would cost to level a
million molehills, if the men were paid tenpence an hour; and again,
how many hundredweight of nails at 5½d. a gill were needed to
repair the fence round the park, which was fteen miles in
circumference. And so on and so on.
The tale, we say, is tedious, for one cupboard is much like another,
and one molehill not much di erent from a million. Some pleasant
journeys it cost him; and some ne adventures. As, for instance,
when he set a whole city of blind women near Bruges to stitch
hangings for a silver canopied bed; and the story of his adventure
with a Moor in Venice of whom he bought (but only at the sword’s
point) his lacquered cabinet, might, in other hands, prove worth the
telling. Nor did the work lack variety; for here would come, drawn
by teams from Sussex, great trees, to be sawn across and laid along
the gallery for ooring;36 and then a chest from Persia, stu ed with
wool and sawdust, from which, at last, he would take a single plate,
or one topaz ring.
At length, however, there was no room in the galleries for another
table; no room on the tables for another cabinet; no room in the
cabinet for another rose-bowl; no room in the bowl for another
handful of pot-pourri; there was no room for anything anywhere; in
short the house was furnished. In the garden snowdrops, crocuses,
hyacinths, magnolias, roses, lilies, asters, the dahlia in all its
varieties, pear trees and apple trees and cherry trees and mulberry
trees, with an enormous quantity of rare and owering shrubs, of
trees evergreen and perennial, grew so thick on each other’s roots
that there was no plot of earth without its bloom, and no stretch of
sward without its shade. In addition, he had imported wild fowl
with gay plumage; and two Malay bears, the surliness of whose
manners concealed, he was certain, trusty hearts.
All now was ready; and when it was evening and the innumerable
silver sconces were lit and the light airs which for ever moved about
the galleries stirred the blue and green arras, so that it looked as if
the huntsmen were riding and Daphne ying; when the silver shone
and lacquer glowed and wood kindled; when the carved chairs held
their arms out and dolphins swam upon the walls with mermaids on
their backs;37 when all this and much more than all this was
complete and to his liking, Orlando walked through the house with
his elk-hounds following and felt content. He had matter now, he
thought, to ll out his peroration. Perhaps it would be well to begin
the speech all over again. Yet, as he paraded the galleries he felt
that still something was lacking. Chairs and tables, however richly
gilt and carved, sofas, resting on lions’ paws with swans’ necks
curving under them, beds even of the softest swansdown are not by
themselves enough. People sitting in them, people lying in them
improve them amazingly. Accordingly Orlando now began a series
of very splendid entertainments to the nobility and gentry of the
neighbourhood. The three hundred and sixty- ve bedrooms were
full for a month at a time. Guests jostled each other on the fty-two
staircases. Three hundred servants bustled about the pantries.
Banquets took place almost nightly. Thus, in a very few years,
Orlando had worn the nap o his velvet, and spent the half of his
fortune; but he had earned the good opinion of his neighbours, held
a score of o ces in the county, and was annually presented with
perhaps a dozen volumes dedicated to his Lordship in rather
fulsome terms by grateful poets. For though he was careful not to
consort with writers at that time and kept himself always aloof from
ladies of foreign blood, still, he was excessively generous both to
women and to poets, and both adored him.
But when the feasting was at its height and his guests were at their
revels, he was apt to take himself o to his private room alone.
There when the door was shut, and he was certain of privacy, he
would have out an old writing book, stitched together with silk
stolen from his mother’s workbox, and labelled in a round schoolboy
hand,38 ‘The Oak Tree, A Poem’. In this he would write till midnight
chimed and long after. But as he scratched out as many lines as he
wrote in, the sum of them was often, at the end of the year, rather
less than at the beginning, and it looked as if in the process of
writing the poem would be completely unwritten. For it is for the
historian of letters to remark that he had changed his style
amazingly. His oridity was chastened; his abundance curbed; the
age of prose was congealing those warm fountains. The very
landscape outside was less stuck about with garlands and the briars
themselves were less thorned and intricate. Perhaps the senses were
a little duller and honey and cream less seductive to the palate. Also
that the streets were better drained and the houses better lit had its
e ect upon the style, it cannot be doubted.
One day he was adding a line or two with enormous labour to ‘The
Oak Tree, A Poem’, when a shadow crossed the tail of his eye. It was
no shadow, he soon saw, but the gure of a very tall lady in riding
hood and mantle crossing the quadrangle on which his room looked
out. As this was the most private of the courts, and the lady was a
stranger to him, Orlando marvelled how she had got there. Three
days later the same apparition appeared again; and on Wednesday
noon appeared once more. This time, Orlando was determined to
follow her, nor apparently was she afraid to be found, for she
slackened her steps as he came up and looked him full in the face.
Any other woman thus caught in a Lord’s private grounds would
have been afraid; any other woman with that face, headdress, and
aspect would have thrown her mantilla across her shoulders to hide
it. For this lady resembled nothing so much as a hare; a hare
startled, but obdurate; a hare whose timidity is overcome by an
immense and foolish audacity; a hare that sits upright and glowers
at its pursuer with great, bulging eyes; with ears erect but quivering,
with nose pointed, but twitching. This hare, moreover, was six feet
high and wore a headdress into the bargain of some antiquated kind
which made her look still taller. Thus confronted, she stared at
Orlando with a stare in which timidity and audacity were most
strangely combined.
First, she asked him, with a proper, but somewhat clumsy curtsey,
to forgive her her intrusion. Then, rising to her full height again,
which must have been something over six feet two, she went on to
say — but with such a cackle of nervous laughter, so much tee-
heeing and haw-hawing that Orlando thought she must have
escaped from a lunatic asylum — that she was the Archduchess
Harriet39 Griselda of Finster-Aarhorn and Scand-op-Boom in the
Roumanian territory. She desired above all things to make his
acquaintance, she said. She had taken lodging over a baker’s shop at
the Park Gates. She had seen his picture and it was the image of a
sister of hers who was — here she gu awed — long since dead. She
was visiting the English court. The Queen was her Cousin. The King
was a very good fellow but seldom went to bed sober. Here she tee-
heed and haw-hawed again. In short, there was nothing for it but to
ask her in and give her a glass of wine.
Indoors, her manners regained the hauteur natural to a
Roumanian Archduchess; and had she not shown a knowledge of
wines rare in a lady, and made some observations upon rearms
and the customs of sportsmen in her country, which were sensible
enough, the talk would have lacked spontaneity. Jumping to her
THE ARCHDUCHESS HARRIET
feet at last, she announced that she would call the following day,
swept another prodigious curtsey and departed. The following day,
Orlando rode out. The next, he turned his back; on the third he
drew his curtain. On the fourth it rained, and as he could not keep a
lady in the wet, nor was altogether averse to company, he invited
her in and asked her opinion whether a suit of armour, which
belonged to an ancestor of his, was the work of Jacobi or of Topp.40
He inclined to Topp. She held another opinion — it matters very
little which. But it is of some importance to the course of our story
that, in illustrating her argument, which had to do with the working
of the tie pieces, the Archduchess Harriet took the golden shin case
and tted it to Orlando’s leg.
That he had a pair of the shapeliest legs that any Nobleman has
ever stood upright upon has already been said.
Perhaps something in the way she fastened the ankle buckle; or
her stooping posture; or Orlando’s long seclusion; or the natural
sympathy which is between the sexes; or the Burgundy; or the re
— any of these causes may have been to blame; for certainly blame
there is on one side or another, when a Nobleman of Orlando’s
breeding, entertaining a lady in his house, and she his elder by
many years, with a face a yard long and staring eyes, dressed
somewhat ridiculously too, in a mantle and riding cloak though the
season was warm — blame there is when such a Nobleman is so
suddenly and violently overcome by passion of some sort that he
has to leave the room.
 But what sort of passion, it may well be asked, could this be? And
the answer is double faced as Love herself. For Love — but leaving
Love out of the argument for a moment, the actual event was this:
When the Archduchess Harriet Griselda stooped to fasten the
buckle, Orlando heard, suddenly and unaccountably, far o the
beating of Love’s wings. The distant stir of that soft plumage roused
in him a thousand memories of rushing waters, of loveliness in the
snow and faithlessness in the ood; and the sound came nearer; and
he blushed and trembled; and he was moved as he had thought
never to be moved again; and he was ready to raise his hands and
let the bird of beauty alight upon his shoulders, when — horror! —
a creaking sound like that the crows make tumbling over the trees
began to reverberate; the air seemed dark with coarse black wings;
voices croaked; bits of straw, twigs, and feathers dropped; and there
pitched down upon his shoulders the heaviest and foulest of the
birds; which is the vulture. Thus he rushed from the room and sent
the footman to see the Archduchess Harriet to her carriage.
For Love, to which we may now return, has two faces; one white,
the other black; two bodies; one smooth, the other hairy. It has two
hands, two feet, two tails, two, indeed, of every member and each
one is the exact opposite of the other. Yet, so strictly are they joined
together that you cannot separate them. In this case, Orlando’s love
began her ight towards him with her white face turned, and her
smooth and lovely body outwards. Nearer and nearer she came
wafting before her airs of pure delight. All of a sudden (at the sight
of the Archduchess presumably) she wheeled about, turned the
other way round; showed herself black, hairy, brutish; and it was
Lust the vulture, not Love, the Bird of Paradise, that opped, foully
and disgustingly, upon his shoulders. Hence he ran; hence he
fetched the footman.
But the harpy is not so easily banished as all that. Not only did the
Archduchess continue to lodge at the Baker’s, but Orlando was
haunted every day and night by phantoms of the foulest kind.
Vainly, it seemed, had he furnished his house with silver and hung
the walls with arras, when at any moment a dung-bedraggled fowl
could settle upon his writing-table. There she was, opping about
among the chairs; he saw her waddling ungracefully across the
galleries. Now, she perched, top heavy upon a re screen. When he
chased her out, back she came and pecked at the glass till she broke
it.
Thus realising that his home was uninhabitable, and that steps
must be taken to end the matter instantly, he did what any other
young man would have done in his place, and asked King Charles to
send him as Ambassador Extraordinary to Constantinople. The King
was walking in Whitehall. Nell Gwyn was on his arm.41 She was
pelting him with hazel nuts. ”Twas a thousand pities, that amorous
lady sighed, that such a pair of legs should leave the country.
Howbeit, the Fates were hard; she could do no more than toss one
kiss over her shoulder before Orlando sailed.
 Chapter III

It is, indeed, highly unfortunate, and much to be regretted that at

this stage of Orlando’s career, when he played a most important part
in the public life of his country, we have least information to go
upon. We know that he discharged his duties to admiration —
witness his Bath and his Dukedom.1 We know that he had a nger
in some of the most delicate negotiations between King Charles and
the Turks — to that, treaties in the vault of the Record O ce bear
testimony. But the revolution which broke out during his period of
o ce, and the re2 which followed, have so damaged or destroyed
all those papers from which any trustworthy record could be drawn,
that what we can give is lamentably incomplete. Often the paper
was scorched a deep brown in the middle of the most important
sentence. Just when we thought to elucidate a secret that has
puzzled historians for a hundred years, there was a hole in the
manuscript big enough to put your nger through. We have done
our best to piece out a meagre summary from the charred fragments
that remain; but often it has been necessary to speculate, to surmise,
and even to use the imagination.
Orlando’s day was passed, it would seem, somewhat in this
fashion. About seven, he would rise, wrap himself in a long Turkish
cloak, light a cheroot,3 and lean his elbows on the parapet. Thus he
would stand, gazing at the city beneath him, apparently entranced.
At this hour the mist would lie so thick that the domes of Santa
So a4 and the rest would seem to be a oat; gradually the mist
would uncover them; the bubbles would be seen to be rmly xed;
there would be the river; there the Galata Bridge; there the green-
turbaned pilgrims without eyes or noses, begging alms; there the
pariah dogs picking up o al; there the shawled women; there the
innumerable donkeys; there men on horses carrying long poles.
Soon, the whole town would be astir with the cracking of whips, the
beating of gongs, cryings to prayer, lashing of mules, and rattle of
brass-bound wheels, while sour odours, made from bread
fermenting and incense, and spice, rose even to the heights of Pera
itself and seemed the very breath of the strident multi-coloured and
barbaric population.
Nothing, he re ected, gazing at the view which was now sparkling
in the sun, could well be less like the counties of Surrey and Kent or
the towns of London and Tunbridge Wells. To the right and left rose
in bald and stony prominence the inhospitable Asian mountains, to
which the arid castle of a robber chief or two might hang; but
parsonage there was none, nor manor house, nor cottage, nor oak,
elm, violet, ivy, or wild eglantine. There were no hedges for ferns to
grow on, and no elds for sheep to graze. The houses were white as
egg-shells and as bald. That he, who was English root and bre,
should yet exult to the depths of his heart in this wild panorama,
and gaze and gaze at those passes and far heights planning journeys
there alone on foot5 where only the goat and shepherd had gone
before; should feel a passion of a ection for the bright,
unseasonable owers, love the unkempt, pariah dogs beyond even
his elk-hounds at home, and snu the acrid, sharp smell of the
streets eagerly into his nostrils, surprised him. He wondered if, in
the season of the Crusades, one of his ancestors had taken up with a
Circassian6 peasant woman; thought it possible; fancied a certain
darkness in his complexion; and, going indoors again, withdrew to
his bath.
An hour later, properly scented, curled, and anointed, he would
receive visits from secretaries and other high o cials carrying, one
after another, red boxes which yielded only to his own golden key.
Within were papers of the highest importance, of which only
fragments, here a ourish, there a seal rmly attached to a piece of
burnt silk, now remain. Of their contents then, we cannot speak, but
can only testify that Orlando was kept busy, what with his wax and
seals, his various coloured ribbons which had to be diversely
attached, his engrossing of titles and making of ourishes round
capital letters, till luncheon came — a splendid meal of perhaps
thirty courses.
After luncheon, lackeys announced that his coach and six was at
the door, and he went, preceded by purple Janissaries7 running on
foot and waving great ostrich-feather fans above their heads, to call
upon the other ambassadors and dignitaries of state. The ceremony
was always the same. On reaching the courtyard, the Janissaries
struck with their fans upon the main portal, which immediately ew
open revealing a large chamber, splendidly furnished. Here were
seated two gures, generally of the opposite sexes. Profound bows
and curtseys were exchanged. In the rst room, it was permissible
only to mention the weather. Having said that it was ne or wet,
hot or cold, the Ambassador then passed on to the next chamber,
where again, two gures rose to greet him. Here it was only
permissible to compare Constantinople as a place of residence with
London; and the Ambassador naturally said that he preferred
Constantinople, and his hosts naturally said, though they had not
seen it, that they preferred London. In the next chamber, King
Charles’s and the Sultan’s healths had to be discussed at some
length. In the next were discussed the Ambassador’s health and that
of his host’s wife, but more brie y. In the next the Ambassador
complimented his host upon his furniture, and the host
complimented the Ambassador upon his dress. In the next,
sweetmeats were o ered, the host deploring their badness, the
Ambassador extolling their goodness. The ceremony ended at length
with the smoking of a hookah8 and the drinking of a glass of co ee;
but though the motions of smoking and drinking were gone through
punctiliously there was neither tobacco in the pipe nor co ee in the
glass, as, had either smoke or drink been real, the human frame
would have sunk beneath the surfeit. For, no sooner had the
Ambassador despatched one such visit, than another had to be
undertaken. The same ceremonies were gone through in precisely
the same order six or seven times over at the houses of the other
great o cials, so that it was often late at night before the
Ambassador reached home. Though Orlando performed these tasks
to admiration and never denied that they are, perhaps, the most
important part of a diplomatist’s duties, he was undoubtedly
ORLANDO AS AMBASSADOR
fatigued by them, and often depressed to such a pitch of gloom that
he preferred to take his dinner alone with his dogs. To them, indeed,
he might be heard talking in his own tongue. And sometimes, it is
said, he would pass out of his own gates late at night so disguised
that the sentries did not know him. Then he would mingle with the
crowd on the Galata Bridge; or stroll through the bazaars; or throw
aside his shoes and join the worshippers in the Mosques. Once,
when it was given out that he was ill of a fever, shepherds, bringing
their goats to market, reported that they had met an English Lord on
the mountain top and heard him praying to his God. This was
thought to be Orlando himself, and his prayer was, no doubt, a
poem said aloud, for it was known that he still carried about with
him, in the bosom of his cloak, a much scored manuscript; and
servants, listening at the door, heard the Ambassador chanting
something in an odd, sing-song voice when he was alone.
It is with fragments such as these that we must do our best to
make up a picture of Orlando’s life and character at this time. There
exist, even to this day, rumours, legends, anecdotes of a oating and
unauthenticated kind about Orlando’s life in Constantinople — (we
have quoted but a few of them) which go to prove that he
possessed, now that he was in the prime of life, the power to stir the
fancy and rivet the eye which will keep a memory green long after
all that more durable qualities can do to preserve it is forgotten. The
power is a mysterious one compounded of beauty, birth, and some
rarer gift, which we may call glamour and have done with it. ‘A
million candles’, as Sasha had said, burnt in him without his being
at the trouble of lighting a single one. He moved like a stag, without
any need to think about his legs. He spoke in his ordinary voice and
echo beat a silver gong. Hence rumours gathered round him. He
became the adored of many women and some men. It was not
necessary that they should speak to him or even that they should see
him; they conjured up before them especially when the scenery was
romantic, or the sun was setting, the gure of a noble gentleman in
silk stockings. Upon the poor and uneducated, he had the same
power as upon the rich. Shepherds, gipsies, donkey drivers, still sing
songs about the English Lord ‘who dropped his emeralds in the
well’, which undoubtedly refer to Orlando, who once, it seems, tore
his jewels from him in a moment of rage or intoxication and ung
them in a fountain; whence they were shed by a page boy. But this
romantic power, it is well known, is often associated with a nature
of extreme reserve. Orlando seems to have made no friends. As far
as is known, he formed no attachments. A certain great lady came
all the way from England in order to be near him, and pestered him
with her attentions, but he continued to discharge his duties so
indefatigably that he had not been Ambassador at the Horn more
than two years and a half before King Charles signi ed his intention
of raising him to the highest rank in the peerage. The envious said
that this was Nell Gwyn’s tribute to the memory of a leg. But, as she
had seen him once only, and was then busily engaged in pelting her
royal master with nutshells, it is likely that it was his merits that
won him his Dukedom, not his calves.
 Here we must pause, for we have reached a moment of great
signi cance in his career. For the conferring of the Dukedom was
the occasion of a very famous, and indeed, much disputed incident,
which we must now describe, picking our way among burnt papers
and little bits of tape as best we may. It was at the end of the great
fast of Ramadan9 that the Order of the Bath and the patent of
nobility arrived in a frigate commanded by Sir Adrian Scrope; and
Orlando made this the occasion for an entertainment more splendid
than any that has been known before or since in Constantinople.
The night was ne; the crowd immense, and the windows of the
Embassy brilliantly illuminated. Again, details are lacking, for the
re had its way with all such records, and has left only tantalising
fragments which leave the most important points obscure. From the
diary of John Fenner Brigge,10 however, an English naval o cer,
who was among the guests, we gather that people of all nationalities
‘were packed like herrings in a barrel’ in the courtyard. The crowd
pressed so unpleasantly close that Brigge soon climbed into a Judas
tree, the better to observe the proceedings. The rumour had got
about among the natives (and here is additional proof of Orlando’s
mysterious power over the imagination) that some kind of miracle
was to be performed. ‘Thus,’ writes Brigge (but his manuscript is full
of burns and holes, some sentences being quite illegible), ‘when the
rockets began to soar into the air, there was considerable uneasiness
among us lest the native population should be seized… fraught with
unpleasant consequences to all… English ladies in the company, I
own that my hand went to my cutlass. Happily,’ he continues in his
somewhat long-winded style, ‘these fears seemed, for the moment,
groundless and, observing the demeanour of the natives… I came to
the conclusion that this demonstration of our skill in the art of
pyrotechny was valuable, if only because it impressed upon them…
the superiority of the British… Indeed, the sight was one of
indescribable magni cence. I found myself alternately praising the
Lord that he had permitted… and wishing that my poor, dear
mother… 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, though unable… I was intent
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.
Happily, Miss Penelope Hartopp, daughter of the General of that
name, saw the scene from inside and carries on the tale in a letter,
much defaced too, which ultimately reached a female friend at
Tunbridge Wells. Miss Penelope was no less lavish in her enthusiasm
than the gallant o cer. ‘Ravishing,’ she exclaims ten times on one
page, ‘wondrous… utterly beyond description… gold plate…
candelabras… negroes in plush breeches… pyramids of ice…
fountains of negus… jellies made to represent His Majesty’s ships…
swans made to represent water lilies… birds in golden cages…
gentlemen in slashed crimson velvet… Ladies’ headdresses at least
six foot high… musical boxes… Mr. Peregrine said I looked quite
lovely which I only repeat to you, my dearest, because I know… Oh!
how I longed for you all!… surpassing anything we have seen at the
Pantiles… oceans to drink… some gentlemen overcome… Lady
Betty ravishing… Poor Lady Bonham made the unfortunate mistake
of sitting down without a chair beneath her… Gentlemen all very
gallant… wished a thousand times for you and dearest Betsy… But
the sight of all others, the cynosure of all eyes… as all admitted, for
none could be so vile as to deny it, was the Ambassador himself.
Such a leg! Such a countenance!! Such princely manners!!! To see
him come into the room! To see him go out again! And something
interesting in the expression, which makes one feel, one scarcely
knows why, that he has su ered! They say a lady was the cause of it.
The heartless monster!!! How can one of our reputed tender sex have
had the e rontery!!! He is unmarried, and half the ladies in the
place are wild for love of him… A thousand, thousand kisses to
Tom, Gerry, Peter, and dearest Mew’ [presumably her cat].
From the Gazette of the time, we gather that ‘as the clock struck
twelve, the Ambassador appeared on the centre Balcony which was
hung with priceless rugs. Six Turks of the Imperial Body Guard, each
over six foot in height, held torches to his right and left. Rockets
rose into the air at his appearance, and a great shout went up from
the people, which the Ambassador acknowledged, bowing deeply,
and speaking a few words of thanks in the Turkish language, which
it was one of his accomplishments to speak with uency. Next, Sir
Adrian Scrope, in the full dress of a British Admiral, advanced; the
Ambassador knelt on one knee; the Admiral placed the Collar of the
Most Noble Order of the Bath round his neck, then pinned the Star
to his breast; after which another gentleman of the diplomatic corps
advancing in a stately manner placed on his shoulders the ducal
robes, and handed him on a crimson cushion, the ducal coronet.’
At length, with a gesture of extraordinary majesty and grace, rst
bowing profoundly, then raising himself proudly erect, Orlando took
the golden circlet of strawberry leaves and placed it, with a gesture
which none that saw it ever forgot, upon his brows. It was at this
point that the rst disturbance began. Either the people had
expected a miracle — some say a shower of gold was prophesied to
fall from the skies — which did not happen, or this was the signal
chosen for the attack to begin; nobody seems to know; but as the
coronet settled on Orlando’s brows a great uproar rose. Bells began
ringing; the harsh cries of the prophets were heard above the shouts
of the people; many Turks fell at to the ground and touched the
earth with their foreheads. A door burst open. The natives pressed
into the banqueting-rooms. Women shrieked. A certain lady, who
was said to be dying for love of Orlando, seized a candelabra and
dashed it to the ground. What might not have happened, had it not
been for the presence of Sir Adrian Scrope and a squad of British
blue-jackets,11 nobody can say. But the Admiral ordered the bugles
to be sounded; a hundred blue-jackets stood instantly at attention;
the disorder was quelled, and quiet, at least for the time being, fell
upon the scene.
So far, we are on the rm, if rather narrow, ground of ascertained
truth. But nobody has ever known exactly what took place later that
night. The testimony of the sentries and others seems, however, to
prove that the Embassy was empty of company, and shut up for the
night in the usual way by two A.M. The Ambassador was seen to go
to his room, still wearing the insignia of his rank, and shut the door.
Some say he locked it, which was against his custom. Others
maintain that they heard music of a rustic kind, such as shepherds
play, later that night in the courtyard under the Ambassador’s
window. A washer-woman, who was kept awake by a toothache,
said that she saw a man’s gure, wrapped in a cloak or dressing
gown, come out upon the balcony. Then, she said, a woman, much
mu ed, but apparently of the peasant class, was drawn up by
means of a rope which the man let down to her on to the balcony.
There, the washer-woman said, they embraced passionately ‘like
lovers’, and went into the room together, drawing the curtains so
that no more could be seen.
Next morning, the Duke, as we must now call him, was found by
his secretaries sunk in profound slumber amid bed clothes that were
much tumbled. The room was in some disorder, his coronet having
rolled on the oor, and his cloak and garter being ung all of a heap
on a chair. The table was littered with papers. No suspicion was felt
at rst, as the fatigues of the night had been great. But when
afternoon came and he still slept, a doctor was summoned. He
applied remedies which had been used on the previous occasion,
plasters, nettles, emetics, etc., but without success. Orlando slept on.
His secretaries then thought it their duty to examine the papers on
the table. Many were scribbled over with poetry, in which frequent
mention was made of an oak tree. There were also various state
papers and others of a private nature concerning the management of
his estates in England. But at length they came upon a document of
far greater signi cance. It was nothing less, indeed, than a deed of
marriage, drawn up, signed, and witnessed between his Lordship,
Orlando, Knight of the Garter, etc., etc., etc., and Rosina Pepita,12 a
dancer, father unknown, but reputed a gipsy, mother also unknown
but reputed a seller of old iron in the market-place over against the
Galata Bridge. The secretaries looked at each other in dismay. And
still Orlando slept. Morning and evening they watched him, but,
save that his breathing was regular and his cheeks still ushed their
habitual deep rose, he gave no sign of life. Whatever science or
ingenuity could do to waken him they did. But still he slept.
On the seventh day of his trance (Thursday, May the 10th) the
rst shot was red of that terrible and bloody insurrection of which
Lieutenant Brigge had detected the rst symptoms. The Turks rose
against the Sultan, set re to the town, and put every foreigner they
could nd, either to the sword or to the bastinado.13 A few English
managed to escape; but, as might have been expected, the
gentlemen of the British Embassy preferred to die in defence of their
red boxes,14 or, in extreme cases, to swallow bunches of keys rather
than let them fall into the hands of the In del. The rioters broke
into Orlando’s room, but seeing him stretched to all appearance
dead they left him untouched, and only robbed him of his coronet
and the robes of the Garter.
And now again obscurity descends, and would indeed that it were
deeper! Would, we almost have it in our hearts to exclaim, that it
were so deep that we could see nothing whatever through its
opacity! Would that we might here take the pen and write Finis to
our work! Would that we might spare the reader what is to come
and say to him in so many words, Orlando died and was buried. But
here, alas, Truth, Candour, and Honesty, the austere Gods who keep
watch and ward by the inkpot of the biographer, cry No! Putting
their silver trumpets to their lips they demand in one blast, Truth!
And again they cry Truth! and sounding yet a third time in concert
they peal forth, The Truth and nothing but the Truth!
At which — Heaven be praised! for it a ords us a breathing space
— the doors gently open, as if a breath of the gentlest and holiest
zephyr had wafted them apart, and three gures enter.15 First,
comes our Lady of Purity; whose brows are bound with llets of the
whitest lamb’s wool; whose hair is as an avalanche of the driven
snow; and in whose hand reposes the white quill of a virgin goose.
Following her, but with a statelier step, comes our Lady of Chastity;
on whose brow is set like a turret of burning but unwasting re a
diadem of icicles; her eyes are pure stars, and her ngers, if they
touch you, freeze you to the bone. Close behind her, sheltering
indeed in the shadow of her more stately sisters, comes our Lady of
Modesty, frailest and fairest of the three; whose face is only shown
as the young moon shows when it is thin and sickle shaped and half
hidden among clouds. Each advances towards the centre of the
room where Orlando still lies sleeping; and with gestures at once
appealing and commanding, Our Lady of Purity speaks rst:
‘I am the guardian of the sleeping fawn; the snow is dear to me;
and the moon rising; and the silver sea. With my robes I cover the
speckled hen’s eggs and the brindled sea shell; I cover vice and
poverty. On all things frail or dark or doubtful, my veil descends.
Wherefore, speak not, reveal not. Spare, O spare!’
Here the trumpets peal forth.
‘Purity Avaunt! Begone Purity!’
Then Our Lady Chastity speaks:
‘I am she whose touch freezes and whose glance turns to stone. I
have stayed the star in its dancing, and the wave as it falls. The
highest Alps are my dwelling place; and when I walk, the lightnings
ash in my hair; where my eyes fall, they kill. Rather than let
Orlando wake, I will freeze him to the bone. Spare, O spare!’
Here the trumpets peal forth.
‘Chastity Avaunt! Begone Chastity!’
Then Our Lady of Modesty speaks, so low that one can hardly hear:
‘I am she that men call Modesty. Virgin I am and ever shall be. Not
for me the fruitful elds and the fertile vineyard. Increase is odious
to me; and when the apples burgeon or the ocks breed, I run, I run;
I let my mantle fall. My hair covers my eyes. I do not see. Spare, O
spare!’
Again the trumpets peal forth:
‘Modesty Avaunt! Begone Modesty!’
With gestures of grief and lamentation the three sisters now join
hands and dance slowly, tossing their veils and singing as they go:
‘Truth come not out from your horrid den. Hide deeper, fearful
Truth. For you aunt in the brutal gaze of the sun things that were
better unknown and undone; you unveil the shameful; the dark you
make clear, Hide! Hide! Hide!’
Here they make as if to cover Orlando with their draperies. The
trumpets, meanwhile, still blare forth,
‘The Truth and nothing but the Truth.’
At this the Sisters try to cast their veils over the mouths of the
trumpets so as to mu e them, but in vain, for now all the trumpets
blare forth together,
‘Horrid Sisters, go!’
The sisters become distracted and wail in unison, still circling and
inging their veils up and down.
‘It has not always been so! But men want us no longer; the women
detest us. We go; we go. I (Purity says this) to the hen roost. I
(Chastity says this) to the still unravished heights of Surrey. I
(Modesty says this) to any cosy nook where there are ivy and
curtains in plenty.’
‘For there, not here (all speak together joining hands and making
gestures of farewell and despair towards the bed where Orlando lies
sleeping) dwell still in nest and boudoir, o ce and lawcourt those
who love us; those who honour us, virgins and city men; lawyers
and doctors; those who prohibit; those who deny; those who
reverence without knowing why; those who praise without
understanding; the still very numerous (Heaven be praised) tribe of
the respectable; who prefer to see not; desire to know not; love the
darkness; those still worship us, and with reason; for we have given
them Wealth, Prosperity, Comfort, Ease. To them we go, you we
leave. Come, Sisters, come! This is no place for us here.’
They retire in haste, waving their draperies over their heads, as if
to shut out something that they dare not look upon and close the
door behind them.
We are, therefore, now left entirely alone in the room with the
sleeping Orlando and the trumpeters. The trumpeters, ranging
themselves side by side in order, blow one terri c blast —
‘THE TRUTH!’

at which Orlando woke.

He stretched himself. He rose. He stood upright in complete
nakedness before us, and while the trumpets pealed Truth! Truth!
Truth! we have no choice left but confess — he was a woman.

The sound of the trumpets died away and Orlando stood stark
naked. No human being, since the world began, has ever looked
more ravishing. His form combined in one the strength of a man and
a woman’s grace. As he stood there, the silver trumpets prolonged
their note, as if reluctant to leave the lovely sight which their blast
had called forth; and Chastity, Purity, and Modesty, inspired, no
doubt, by Curiosity, peeped in at the door and threw a garment like
a towel at the naked form which, unfortunately, fell short by several
inches. Orlando looked himself up and down in a long looking-glass,
without showing any signs of discomposure, and went, presumably,
to his bath.
We may take advantage of this pause in the narrative to make
certain statements. Orlando had become a woman — there is no
denying it. But in every other respect, Orlando remained precisely
as he had been. The change of sex, though it altered their future, did
nothing whatever to alter their identity. Their faces remained, as
their portraits prove, practically the same. His memory — but in
future we must, for convention’s sake, say ‘her’ for ‘his’, and ‘she’ for
‘he’ — her memory then, went back through all the events of her
past life without encountering any obstacle. Some slight haziness
there may have been, as if a few dark drops had fallen into the clear
pool of memory; certain things had become a little dimmed; but that
was all. The change seemed to have been accomplished painlessly
and completely and in such a way that Orlando herself showed no
surprise at it. Many people, taking this into account, and holding
that such a change of sex is against nature, have been at great pains
to prove (1) that Orlando had always been a woman, (2) that
Orlando is at this moment a man. Let biologists and psychologists
determine. It is enough for us to state the simple fact; Orlando was a
man till the age of thirty; when he became a woman and has
remained so ever since.
But let other pens treat of sex and sexuality;16 we quit such odious
subjects as soon as we can. Orlando had now washed, and dressed
herself in those Turkish coats and trousers which can be worn
indi erently by either sex; and was forced to consider her position.
That it was precarious and embarrassing in the extreme must be the
rst thought of every reader who has followed her story with
sympathy. Young, noble, beautiful, she had woken to nd herself in
a position than which we can conceive none more delicate for a
young lady of rank. We should not have blamed her had she rung
the bell, screamed, or fainted. But Orlando showed no such signs of
perturbation. All her actions were deliberate in the extreme, and
might indeed have been thought to show tokens of premeditation.
First, she carefully examined the papers on the table; took such as
seemed to be written in poetry, and secreted them in her bosom;
next she called her Seleuchi hound,17 which had never left her bed
all these days, though half famished with hunger, fed and combed
him; then stuck a pair of pistols in her belt; nally wound about her
person several strings of emeralds and pearls of the nest orient
which had formed part of her Ambassadorial wardrobe. This done,
she leant out of the window, gave one low whistle, and descended
the shattered and blood-stained staircase, now strewn with the litter
of waste-paper baskets, treaties, despatches, seals, sealing wax, etc.,
and so entered the courtyard. There, in the shadow of a giant g
tree, waited an old gipsy on a donkey. He led another by the bridle.
Orlando swung her leg over it; and thus, attended by a lean dog,
riding a donkey, in company of a gipsy, the Ambassador of Great
Britain at the Court of the Sultan left Constantinople.
They rode for several days and nights and met with a variety of
adventures, some at the hands of men, some at the hands of nature,
in all of which Orlando acquitted herself with courage. Within a
week they reached the high ground outside Broussa,18 which was
then the chief camping ground of the gipsy tribe to which Orlando
had allied herself. Often she had looked at those mountains from her
balcony at the Embassy; often had longed to be there; and to nd
oneself where one has longed to be always, to a re ective mind,
gives food for thought. For some time, however, she was too well
pleased with the change to spoil it by thinking. The pleasure of
having no documents to seal or sign, no ourishes to make, no calls
to pay, was enough. The gipsies followed the grass; when it was
grazed down, on they moved again. She washed in streams if she
washed at all; no boxes, red, blue, or green, were presented to her;
there was not a key, let alone a golden key, in the whole camp; as
for ‘visiting’, the word was unknown. She milked the goats; she
collected brushwood; she stole a hen’s egg now and then, but always
put a coin or a pearl in place of it; she herded cattle; she stripped
vines; she trod the grape; she lled the goat-skin and drank from it;
and when she remembered how, at about this time of day, she
should have been making the motions of drinking and smoking over
an empty co ee-cup and a pipe which lacked tobacco, she laughed
aloud, cut herself another hunch of bread, and begged for a pu
from old Rustum’s pipe, lled though it was with cow dung.
The gipsies, with whom it is obvious that she must have been in
secret communication before the revolution, seem to have looked
upon her as one of themselves (which is always the highest
compliment a people can pay), and her dark hair and dark
complexion bore out the belief that she was, by birth, one of them
and had been snatched by an English Duke from a nut tree when she
was a baby and taken to that barbarous land where people live in
houses because they are too feeble and diseased to stand the open
air. Thus, though in many ways inferior to them, they were willing
to help her to become more like them; taught her their arts of
cheese-making and basket-weaving, their science of stealing and
bird-snaring, and were even prepared to consider letting her marry
among them.
But Orlando had contracted in England some of the customs or
diseases (whatever you choose to consider them) which cannot, it
seems, be expelled. One evening, when they were all sitting round
the camp re and the sunset was blazing over the Thessalian hills,19
Orlando exclaimed:
‘How good to eat!’ (The gipsies have no word for ‘beautiful’. This
is the nearest.)
All the young men and women burst out laughing uproariously.
The sky good to eat, indeed! The elders, however, who had seen
more of foreigners than they had, became suspicious. They noticed
that Orlando often sat for whole hours doing nothing whatever,
except look here and then there; they would come upon her on
some hill-top staring straight in front of her, no matter whether the
goats were grazing or straying. They began to suspect that she had
other beliefs than their own, and the older men and women thought
it probable that she had fallen into the clutches of the vilest and
cruellest among all the Gods, which is Nature. Nor were they far
wrong. The English disease, a love of Nature, was inborn in her, and
here, where Nature was so much larger and more powerful than in
England, she fell into its hands as she had never done before. The
malady is too well known, and has been, alas, too often described to
need describing afresh, save very brie y. There were mountains;
there were valleys; there were streams. She climbed the mountains;
roamed the valleys; sat on the banks of the streams. She likened the
hills to ramparts, to the breasts of doves, and the anks of kine. She
compared the owers to enamel and the turf to Turkey rugs worn
thin. Trees were withered hags, and sheep were grey boulders.
Everything, in fact, was something else. She found the tarn on the
mountain-top and almost threw herself in to seek the wisdom she
thought lay hid there; and when, from the mountain-top, she beheld
far o , across the Sea of Marmara, the plains of Greece, and made
out (her eyes were admirable) the Acropolis with a white streak or
two which must, she thought, be the Parthenon,20 her soul
expanded with her eyeballs, and she prayed that she might share the
majesty of the hills, know the serenity of the plains, etc. etc., as all
such believers do. Then, looking down, the red hyacinth, the purple
iris wrought her to cry out in ecstasy at the goodness, the beauty of
nature; raising her eyes again, she beheld the eagle soaring, and
imagined its raptures and made them her own. Returning home, she
saluted each star, each peak, and each watch- re as if they signalled
to her alone; and at last, when she ung herself upon her mat in the
gipsies’ tent, she could not help bursting out again, How good to
eat! How good to eat! (For it is a curious fact that though human
beings have such imperfect means of communication, that they can
only say ‘good to eat’ when they mean ‘beautiful’ and the other way
about, they will yet endure ridicule and misunderstanding rather
than keep any experience to themselves.) All the young gipsies
laughed. But Rustum el Sadi, the old man who had brought Orlando
out of Constantinople on his donkey, sat silent. He had a nose like a
scimitar; his cheeks were furrowed as if from the age-long descent of
iron hail; he was brown and keen-eyed, and as he sat tugging at his
hookah he observed Orlando narrowly. He had the deepest
suspicion that her God was Nature. One day he found her in tears.
Interpreting this to mean that her God had punished her, he told her
that he was not surprised. He showed her the ngers of his left
hand, withered by the frost; he showed her his right foot, crushed
where a rock had fallen. This, he said, was what her God did to
men. When she said, ‘But so beautiful’, using the English word, he
shook his head; and when she repeated it he was angry. He saw that
she did not believe what he believed, and that was enough, wise
and ancient as he was, to enrage him.
This di erence of opinion disturbed Orlando, who had been
perfectly happy until now. She began to think, was Nature beautiful
or cruel; and then she asked herself what this beauty was; whether
it was in things themselves, or only in herself; so she went on to the
nature of reality, which led her to truth, which in its turn led to
Love, Friendship, Poetry (as in the days on the high mound at
home); which meditations, since she could impart no word of them,
made her long, as she had never longed before, for pen and ink.
‘Oh! if only I could write!’ she cried (for she had the odd conceit of
those who write that words written are shared). She had no ink; and
but little paper. But she made ink from berries and wine; and
nding a few margins and blank spaces in the manuscript of ‘The
Oak Tree’, managed, by writing a kind of shorthand, to describe the
scenery in a long, blank verse poem, and to carry on a dialogue with
herself about this Beauty and Truth concisely enough. This kept her
extremely happy for hours on end. But the gipsies became
suspicious. First, they noticed that she was less adept than before at
milking and cheese-making; next, she often hesitated before
replying; and once a gipsy boy who had been asleep, woke in a
terror feeling her eyes upon him. Sometimes this constraint would
be felt by the whole tribe, numbering some dozens of grown men
and women. It sprang from the sense they had (and their senses are
very sharp and much in advance of their vocabulary) that whatever
they were doing crumbled like ashes in their hands. An old woman
making a basket, a boy skinning a sheep, would be singing or
crooning contentedly at their work, when Orlando would come into
the camp, ing herself down by the re and gaze into the ames.
She need not even look at them, and yet they felt, here is someone
who doubts; (we make a rough-and-ready translation from the gipsy
language) here is someone who does not do the thing for the sake of
doing; nor looks for looking’s sake; here is someone who believes
neither in sheep-skin nor basket; but sees (here they looked
apprehensively about the tent) something else. Then a vague but
most unpleasant feeling would begin to work in the boy and in the
old woman. They broke their withys;21 they cut their ngers. A
great rage lled them. They wished Orlando would leave the tent
and never come near them again. Yet she was of a cheerful and
willing disposition, they owned; and one of her pearls was enough
to buy the nest herd of goats in Broussa.
Slowly, she began to feel that there was some di erence between
her and the gipsies which made her hesitate sometimes to marry
and settle down among them for ever. At rst she tried to account
for it by saying that she came of an ancient and civilised race,
whereas these gipsies were an ignorant people, not much better than
savages. One night when they were questioning her about England
she could not help with some pride describing the house where she
was born, how it had 365 bedrooms and had been in the possession
of her family for four or ve hundred years. Her ancestors were
earls, or even dukes, she added. At this she noticed again that the
gipsies were uneasy; but not angry as before when she had praised
the beauty of nature. Now they were courteous, but concerned as
people of ne breeding are when a stranger has been made to reveal
his low birth or poverty. Rustum followed her out of the tent alone
and said that she need not mind if her father were a Duke, and
possessed all the bedrooms and furniture that she described. They
would none of them think the worse of her for that. Then she was
seized with a shame that she had never felt before. It was clear that
Rustum and the other gipsies thought a descent of four or ve
hundred years only the meanest possible. Their own families went
back at least two or three thousand years. To the gipsy whose
ancestors had built the Pyramids centuries before Christ was born,
the genealogy of Howards and Plantagenets22 was no better and no
worse than that of the Smiths and the Joneses: both were negligible.
Moreover, where the shepherd boy had a lineage of such antiquity,
there was nothing specially memorable or desirable in ancient birth;
vagabonds and beggars all shared it. And then, though he was too
courteous to speak openly, it was clear that the gipsy thought that
there was no more vulgar ambition than to possess bedrooms by the
hundred (they were on top of a hill as they spoke; it was night; the
mountains rose around them) when the whole earth is ours. Looked
at from the gipsy point of view, a Duke, Orlando understood, was
nothing but a pro teer or robber who snatched land and money
from people who rated these things of little worth, and could think
of nothing better to do than to build three hundred and sixty- ve
bedrooms when one was enough, and none was even better than
one. She could not deny that her ancestors had accumulated eld
after eld; house after house; honour after honour; yet had none of
them been saints or heroes, or great benefactors of the human race.
Nor could she counter the argument (Rustum was too much of a
gentleman to press it, but she understood) that any man who did
now what her ancestors had done three or four hundred years ago
would be denounced — and by her own family most loudly — for a
vulgar upstart, an adventurer, a nouveau riche.
She sought to answer such arguments by the familiar if oblique
method of nding the gipsy life itself rude and barbarous; and so, in
a short time, much bad blood was bred between them. Indeed, such
di erences of opinion are enough to cause bloodshed and
revolution. Towns have been sacked for less, and a million martyrs
have su ered at the stake rather than yield an inch upon any of the
points here debated. No passion is stronger in the breast of man
than the desire to make others believe as he believes. Nothing so
cuts at the root of his happiness and lls him with rage as the sense
that another rates low what he prizes high. Whigs and Tories,
Liberal party and Labour party — for what do they battle except
their own prestige? It is not love of truth but desire to prevail that
sets quarter against quarter and makes parish desire the downfall of
parish. Each seeks peace of mind and subserviency rather than the
triumph of truth and the exaltation of virtue — but these moralities
belong, and should be left to the historian, since they are as dull as
ditch water.
‘Four hundred and seventy-six bedrooms mean nothing to them,’
sighed Orlando.
‘She prefers a sunset to a ock of goats,’ said the gipsies.
What was to be done, Orlando could not think. To leave the
gipsies and become once more an Ambassador seemed to her
intolerable. But it was equally impossible to remain for ever where
there was neither ink nor writing paper, neither reverence for the
Talbots nor respect for a multiplicity of bedrooms. So she was
thinking, one ne morning on the slopes of Mount Athos,23 when
minding her goats. And then Nature, in whom she trusted, either
played her a trick or worked a miracle -again, opinions di er too
much for it to be possible to say which. Orlando was gazing rather
disconsolately at the steep hill-side in front of her. It was now
midsummer, and if we must compare the landscape to anything, it
would have been to a dry bone; to a sheep’s skeleton; to a gigantic
skull picked white by a thousand vultures. The heat was intense,
and the little g tree under which Orlando lay only served to print
patterns of g-leaves upon her light burnous.24
Suddenly a shadow, though there was nothing to cast a shadow,
appeared on the bald mountain-side opposite. It deepened quickly
and soon a green hollow showed where there had been barren rock
before. As she looked, the hollow deepened and widened, and a
great park-like space opened in the ank of the hill. Within, she
could see an undulating and grassy lawn; she could see oak trees
dotted here and there; she could see the thrushes hopping among
the branches. She could see the deer stepping delicately from shade
to shade, and could even hear the hum of insects and the gentle
sighs and shivers of a summer’s day in England. After she had gazed
entranced for some time, snow began falling; soon the whole
landscape was covered and marked with violet shades instead of
yellow sunlight. Now she saw heavy carts coming along the roads,
laden with tree trunks,25 which they were taking, she knew, to be
sawn for rewood; and then there appeared the roofs and belfries
and towers and courtyards of her own home. The snow was falling
steadily, and she could now hear the slither and op which it made
as it slid down the roof and fell to the ground. The smoke went up
from a thousand chimneys. All was so clear and minute that she
could see a daw pecking for worms in the snow. Then, gradually,
the violet shadows deepened and closed over the carts and the
lawns and the great house itself. All was swallowed up. Now there
was nothing left of the grassy hollow, and instead of the green lawns
was only the blazing hill-side which a thousand vultures seemed to
have picked bare. At this, she burst into a passion of tears, and
striding back to the gipsies’ camp, told them that she must sail for
England the very next day.
It was happy for her that she did so. Already the young men had
plotted her death. Honour, they said, demanded it, for she did not
think as they did. Yet they would have been sorry to cut her throat;
and welcomed the news of her departure. An English merchant ship,
as luck would have it, was already under sail in the harbour about
to return to England; and Orlando, by breaking o another pearl
from her necklace, not only paid her passage but had some bank-
notes left over in her wallet. These she would have liked to present
to the gipsies. But they despised wealth she knew; and she had to
content herself with embraces, which on her part were sincere.
 Chapter IV

With some of the guineas left from the sale of the tenth pearl of her
string, Orlando had bought herself a complete out t of such clothes
as women then wore, and it was in the dress of a young
Englishwoman of rank that she now sat on the deck of the
Enamoured Lady. It is a strange fact, but a true one, that up to this
moment she had scarcely given her sex a thought. Perhaps the
Turkish trousers which she had hitherto worn had done something
to distract her thoughts; and the gipsy women, except in one or two
important particulars, di er very little from the gipsy men. At any
rate, it was not until she felt the coil of skirts about her legs and the
Captain o ered, with the greatest politeness, to have an awning
spread for her on deck, that she realised with a start the penalties
and the privileges of her position. But that start was not of the kind
that might have been expected.
It was not caused, that is to say, simply and solely by the thought
of her chastity and how she could preserve it. In normal
circumstances a lovely young woman alone would have thought of
nothing else; the whole edi ce of female government is based on
that foundation stone; chastity is their jewel, their centre-piece,
which they run mad to protect, and die when ravished of. But if one
has been a man for thirty years or so, and an Ambassador into the
bargain, if one has held a Queen in one’s arms and one or two other
ladies, if report be true, of less exalted rank, if one has married a
Rosina Pepita, and so on, one does not perhaps give such a very
great start about that. Orlando’s start was of a very complicated
kind, and not to be summed up in a trice. Nobody, indeed, ever
accused her of being one of those quick wits who run to the end of
things in a minute. It took her the entire length of the voyage to
moralise out the meaning of her start, and so, at her own pace, we
will follow her.
‘Lord,’ she thought, when she had recovered from her start,
stretching herself out at length under her awning, ‘this is a pleasant,
lazy way of life, to be sure. But’, she thought, giving her legs a kick,
‘these skirts are plaguey things to have about one’s heels. Yet the
stu ( owered paduasoy1) is the loveliest in the world. Never have I
seen my own skin (here she laid her hand on her knee) look to such
advantage as now. Could I, however, leap overboard and swim in
clothes like these? No! Therefore, I should have to trust to the
protection of a blue-jacket. Do I object to that? Now do I?’ she
wondered, here encountering the rst knot in the smooth skein of
her argument.
Dinner came before she had untied it, and then it was the Captain
himself – Captain Nicholas Benedict Bartolus, a sea-captain of
distinguished aspect, who did it for her as he helped her to a slice of
corned beef.
‘A little of the fat, Ma’am?’ he asked. ‘Let me cut you just the
tiniest little slice the size of your nger nail.’ At those words a
delicious tremor ran through her frame. Birds sang; the torrents
rushed. It recalled the feeling of indescribable pleasure with which
she had rst seen Sasha, hundreds of years ago. Then she had
pursued, now she ed. Which is the greater ecstasy? The man’s or
the woman’s? And are they not perhaps the same? No, she thought,
this is the most delicious (thanking the Captain but refusing), to
refuse, and see him frown. Well, she would, if he wished it, have the
very thinnest, smallest shiver2 in the world. This was the most
delicious of all, to yield and see him smile. ‘For nothing’, she
thought, regaining her couch on deck, and continuing the argument,
‘is more heavenly than to resist and to yield; to yield and to resist.
Surely it throws the spirit into such a rapture as nothing else can. So
that I’m not sure’, she continued, ‘that I won’t throw myself
overboard, for the mere pleasure of being rescued by a blue-jacket
after all.’
(It must be remembered that she was like a child entering into
possession of a pleasaunce3 or toy cupboard; her arguments would
not commend themselves to mature women, who have had the run
of it all their lives.)
‘But what used we young fellows in the cockpit of the MarieRose to
say about a woman who threw herself overboard for the pleasure of
being rescued by a blue-jacket?’ she said. ‘We had a word for them.
Ah! I have it …’ (But we must omit that word; it was disrespectful in
the extreme and passing strange on a lady’s lips.) ‘Lord! Lord!’ she
cried again at the conclusion of her thoughts, ‘must I then begin to
respect the opinion of the other sex, however monstrous I think it?
If I wear skirts, if I can’t swim, if I have to be rescued by a blue-
jacket, by God!’ she cried, ‘I must!’ Upon which a gloom fell over
her. Candid by nature, and averse to all kinds of equivocation, to
tell lies bored her. It seemed to her a roundabout way of going to
work. Yet, she re ected, the owered paduasoy – the pleasure of
being rescued by a blue-jacket – if these were only to be obtained by
roundabout ways, roundabout one must go, she supposed. She
remembered how, as a young man, she had insisted that women
must be obedient, chaste, scented, and exquisitely apparelled. ‘Now
I shall have to pay in my own person for those desires’ she re ected;
‘for women are not (judging by my own short experience of the sex)
obedient, chaste, scented, and exquisitely apparelled by nature.
They can only attain these graces, without which they may enjoy
none of the delights of life, by the most tedious discipline. There’s
the hairdressing’ she thought, ‘that alone will take an hour of my
morning; there’s looking in the looking-glass, another hour; there’s
staying and lacing; there’s washing and powdering; there’s changing
from silk to lace and from lace to paduasoy; there’s being chaste
year in year out …’ Here she tossed her foot impatiently, and
showed an inch or two of calf. A sailor on the mast, who happened
to look down at the moment, started so violently that he missed his
footing and only saved himself by the skin of his teeth. ‘If the sight
of my ankles means death to an honest fellow who, no doubt, has a
wife and family to support, I must, in all humanity, keep them
covered’ Orlando thought. Yet her legs were among her chiefest
beauties. And she fell to thinking what an odd pass we have come to
when all a woman’s beauty has to be kept covered lest a sailor may
fall from a mast-head. ‘A pox on them!’ she said, realizing
Orlando About the Year
for the rst time what, in other circumstances, she would have been
taught as a child, that is to say, the sacred responsibilities of
womanhood.
‘And that’s the last oath I shall ever be able to swear,’ she thought;
‘once I set foot on English soil. And I shall never be able to crack a
man over the head, or tell him he lies in his teeth, or draw my
sword and run him through the body, or sit among my peers, or
wear a coronet, or walk in procession, or sentence a man to death,
or lead an army, or prance down Whitehall on a charger, or wear
seventy-two di erent medals on my breast. All I can do, once I set
foot on English soil, is to pour out tea and ask my lords how they
like it. D’you take sugar. D’you take cream?’ And mincing out the
words, she was horri ed to perceive how low an opinion she was
forming of the other sex, the manly, to which it had once been her
pride to belong. ‘To fall from a mast-head’, she thought, ‘because
you see a woman’s ankles; to dress up like a Guy Fawkes4 and
parade the streets, so that women may praise you; to deny a woman
teaching lest she may laugh at you; to be the slave of the frailest
chit in petticoats, and yet to go about as if you were the Lords of
creation – Heavens!’ she thought, ‘what fools they make of us –
what fools we are!’ And here it would seem from some ambiguity in
her terms that she was censuring both sexes equally, as if she
belonged to neither; and indeed, for the time being, she seemed to
vacillate; she was man; she was woman; she knew the secrets,
shared the weaknesses of each. It was a most bewildering and
whirligig state of mind to be in. The comforts of ignorance seemed
utterly denied her. She was a feather blown on the gale. Thus it is
no great wonder, as she pitted one sex against the other, and found
each alternately full of the most deplorable in rmities, and was not
sure to which she belonged – it was no great wonder that she was
about to cry out that she would return to Turkey and become a
gipsy again when the anchor fell with a great splash into the sea;
the sails came tumbling on deck, and she perceived (so sunk had she
been in thought that she had seen nothing for several days) that the
ship was anchored o the coast of Italy. The Captain at once sent to
ask the honour of her company ashore with him in the long-boat.
When she returned the next morning, she stretched herself on her
couch under the awning and arranged her draperies with the
greatest decorum about her ankles.
‘Ignorant and poor as we are compared with the other sex,’ she
thought, continuing the sentence which she had left un nished the
other day, ‘armoured with every weapon as they are, while they
debar us even from a knowledge of the alphabet’ (and from these
opening words it is plain that something had happened during the
night to give her a push towards the female sex, for she was
speaking more as a woman speaks than as a man, yet with a sort of
content after all), ‘still – they fall from the mast-head.’ Here she
gave a great yawn and fell asleep. When she woke, the ship was
sailing before a fair breeze so near the shore that towns on the cli s’
edge seemed only kept from slipping into the water by the
interposition of some great rock or the twisted roots of some ancient
olive tree. The scent of oranges wafted from a million trees, heavy
with the fruit, reached her on deck. A score of blue dolphins,
twisting their tails, leapt high now and again into the air. Stretching
her arms out (arms, she had learnt already, have no such fatal
e ects 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 martial
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 was when
deeply moved, ‘contemplation, solitude, love.’
‘Praise God that I’m a woman!’ she cried, and was about to run
into the extreme folly – than which none is more distressing in
woman or man either – of being proud of her sex, when she paused
over the singular word, which, for all we can do to put it in its
place, has crept in at the end of the last sentence: Love. ‘Love,’ said
Orlando. Instantly – such is its impetuosity – love took a human
shape – such is its pride. For where other thoughts are content to
remain abstract, nothing will satisfy this one but to put on esh and
blood, mantilla and petticoats, hose and jerkin. And as all Orlando’s
loves had been women, now, through the culpable laggardry of the
human frame to adapt itself to convention, though she herself was a
woman, it was still a woman she loved; and if the consciousness of
being of the same sex had any e ect at all, it was to quicken and
deepen those feelings which she had had as a man. For now a
thousand hints and mysteries became plain to her that were then
dark. Now, the obscurity, which divides the sexes and lets linger
innumerable impurities in its gloom, was removed, and if there is
anything in what the poet says about truth and beauty, this a ection
gained in beauty what it lost in falsity. At last, she cried, she knew
Sasha as she was, and in the ardour of this discovery, and in the
pursuit of all those treasures which were now revealed, she was so
rapt and enchanted that it was as if a cannon ball had exploded at
her ear when a man’s voice said, ‘Permit me, Madam,’ a man’s hand
raised her to her feet; and the ngers of a man with a three-masted
sailing ship tattooed on the middle nger pointed to the horizon.
‘The cli s of England, Ma’am,’ said the Captain, and he raised the
hand which had pointed at the sky to the salute. Orlando now gave
a second start, even more violent than the rst.
‘Christ Jesus!’ she cried.
Happily, the sight of her native land after long absence excused
both start and exclamation, or she would have been hard put to it to
explain to Captain Bartolus the raging and con icting emotions
which now boiled within her. How tell him that she, who now
trembled on his arm, had been a Duke and an Ambassador? How
explain to him that she, who had been lapped like a lily in folds of
paduasoy, had hacked heads o , and lain with loose women among
treasure sacks in the holds of pirate ships on summer nights when
the tulips were abloom and the bees buzzing o Wapping Old
Stairs? Not even to herself could she explain the giant start she
gave, as the resolute right hand of the sea-captain indicated the
cli s of the British Islands.
‘To refuse and to yield,’ she murmured, ‘how delightful; to pursue
and to conquer, how august; to perceive and to reason, how
sublime.’ Not one of these words so coupled together seemed to her
wrong; nevertheless, as the chalky cli s loomed nearer, she felt
culpable; dishonoured; unchaste, which, for one who had never
given the matter a thought, was strange. Closer and closer they
drew, till the samphire gatherers,5 hanging half-way down the cli ,
were plain to the naked eye. And watching them, she felt,
scampering up and down within her, like some derisive ghost who
in another instant will pick up her skirts and aunt out of sight,
Sasha the lost, Sasha the memory, whose reality she had proved just
now so surprisingly – Sasha, she felt, mopping and mowing and
making all sorts of disrespectful gestures towards the cli s and the
samphire gatherers; and when the sailors began chanting, ‘So good-
bye and adieu to you, Ladies of Spain’, the words echoed in
Orlando’s sad heart, and she felt that however much landing there
meant comfort, meant opulence, meant consequence and state (for
she would doubtless pick up some noble Prince and reign, his
consort, over half Yorkshire),6 still, if it meant conventionality,
meant slavery, meant deceit, meant denying her love, fettering her
limbs, pursing her lips, and restraining her tongue, then she would
turn about with the ship and set sail once more for the gipsies.
Among the hurry of these thoughts, however, there now rose, like
a dome of smooth, white marble, something which, whether fact or
fancy, was so impressive to her fevered imagination that she settled
upon it as one has seen a swarm of vibrant dragon- ies alight, with
apparent satisfaction, upon the glass bell which shelters some tender
vegetable. The form of it, by the hazard of fancy, recalled that
earliest, most persistent memory – the man with the big forehead in
Twitchett’s sitting-room, the man who sat writing, or rather looking,
but certainly not at her, for he never seemed to see her poised there
in all her nery, lovely boy though she must have been, she could
not deny it – and whenever she thought of him, the thought spread
round it, like the risen moon on turbulent waters, a sheet of silver
calm. Now her hand went to her bosom (the other was still in the
Captain’s keeping), where the pages of her poem were hidden safe.
It might have been a talisman that she kept there. The distraction of
sex, which hers was, and what it meant, subsided; she thought now
only of the glory of poetry, and the great lines of Marlowe,
Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Milton began booming and reverberating,
as if a golden clapper beat against a golden bell in the cathedral
tower which was her mind. The truth was that the image of the
marble dome which her eyes had rst discovered so faintly that it
suggested a poet’s forehead7 and thus started a ock of irrelevant
ideas, was no gment, but a reality; and as the ship advanced down
the Thames before a favouring gale, the image with all its
associations gave place to the truth, and revealed itself as nothing
more and nothing less than the dome of a vast cathedral rising
among a fretwork of white spires.
 ‘St. Paul’s,’ said Captain Bartolus, who stood by her side. ‘The
Tower of London,’ he continued. ‘Greenwich Hospital, erected in
memory of Queen Mary by her husband, his late majesty, William
the Third. Westminster Abbey. The Houses of Parliament.’ As he
spoke, each of these famous buildings rose to view. It was a ne
September morning. A myriad of little water-craft plied from bank
to bank. Rarely has a gayer, or more interesting, spectacle presented
itself to the gaze of a returned traveller. Orlando hung over the
prow, absorbed in wonder. Her eyes had been used too long to
savages and nature not to be entranced by these urban glories. That,
then, was the dome of St. Paul’s which Mr. Wren had built during
her absence. Near by, a shock of golden hair burst from a pillar –
Captain Bartolus was at her side to inform her that that was the
Monument; there had been a plague and a re during her absence,
he said. Do what she would to restrain them, the tears came to her
eyes, until, remembering that it is becoming in a woman to weep,
she let them ow. Here, she thought, had been the great carnival.
Here, where the waves slapped briskly, had stood the Royal
Pavilion. Here she had rst met Sasha. About here (she looked down
into the sparkling waters) one had been used to see the frozen bum-
boat woman with her apples on her lap. All that splendour and
corruption was gone. Gone, too, was the dark night, the monstrous
downpour, the violent surges of the ood. Here, where yellow
icebergs had raced circling with a crew of terror-stricken wretches
on top, a covey of swans oated, orgulous, undulant, superb.8
London itself had completely changed since she had last seen it.
Then, she remembered, it had been a huddle of little black, beetle-
browed houses. The heads of rebels had grinned on pikes at Temple
Bar. The cobbled pavements had reeked of garbage and ordure.
Now, as the ship sailed past Wapping, she caught glimpses of broad
and orderly thoroughfares. Stately coaches drawn by teams of well-
fed horses stood at the doors of houses whose bow windows, whose
plate glass, whose polished knockers, testi ed to the wealth and
modest dignity of the dwellers within. Ladies in owered silk (she
put the Captain’s glass to her eye) walked on raised footpaths.
Citizens in broidered coats took snu at street corners under lamp-
posts. She caught sight of a variety of painted signs swinging in the
breeze and could form a rapid notion from what was painted on
them of the tobacco, of the stu , of the silk, of the gold, of the silver
ware, of the gloves, of the perfumes, and of a thousand other
articles which were sold within. Nor could she do more as the ship
sailed to its anchorage by London Bridge than glance at co ee-house
windows where, on balconies, since the weather was ne, a great
number of decent citizens sat at ease, with china dishes in front of
them, clay pipes by their sides, while one among them read from a
news sheet, and was frequently interrupted by the laughter or the
comments of the others. Were these taverns, were these wits, were
these poets? she asked of Captain Bartolus, who obligingly informed
her that even now – if she turned her head a little to the left and
looked along the line of his rst nger – so – they were passing the
Cocoa Tree, where – yes, there he was – one might see Mr. Addison
taking his co ee; the other two gentlemen – ‘there, Ma’am, a little
to the right of the lamp-post, one of ’em humped, t’other much the
same as you or me’ – were Mr. Dryden and Mr. Pope.* ‘Sad dogs,’
said the Captain, by which he meant that they were Papists,9 ‘but
men of parts, none the less,’ he added, hurrying aft to superintend
the arrangements for landing.
‘Addison, Dryden, Pope,’ Orlando repeated as if the words were an
incantation. For one moment she saw the high mountains above
Broussa, the next, she had set her foot upon her native shore.
But now Orlando was to learn how little the most tempestuous
utter of excitement avails against the iron countenance of the law;
how harder than the stones of London Bridge it is, and than the lips
of a cannon more severe. No sooner had she returned to her home in
Blackfriars than she was made aware by a succession of Bow Street
runners and other grave emissaries from the Law Courts that she
was a party to three major suits10 which had been preferred against
her during her absence, as well as innumerable minor litigations,
some arising out of, others depending on them. The chief charges
against her were (I) that she was dead, and therefore could not hold
any property whatsoever; (2) that she was a woman, which amounts
to much the same thing; (3) that she was an English Duke who had
married one Rosina Pepita, a dancer; and had had by her three sons,
which sons now declaring that their father was deceased, claimed
that all his property descended to them. Such grave charges as these
would, of course, take time and money to dispose of. All her estates
were put in Chancery11 and her titles pronounced in abeyance while
the suits were under litigation. Thus it was in a highly ambiguous
condition, uncertain whether she was alive or dead, man or woman,
Duke or nonentity, that she posted down to her country seat, where,
pending the legal judgment, she had the Law’s permission to reside
in a state of incognito or incognita, as the case might turn out to be.
It was a ne evening in December when she arrived and the snow
was falling and the violet shadows were slanting much as she had
seen them from the hill-top at Broussa. The great house lay more
like a town than a house, brown and blue, rose and purple in the
snow, with all its chimneys smoking busily as if inspired with a life
of their own. She could not restrain a cry as she saw it there tranquil
and massive, couched upon the meadows. As the yellow coach
entered the park and came bowling along the drive between the
trees, the red deer raised their heads as if expectantly, and it was
observed that instead of showing the timidity natural to their kind,
they followed the coach and stood about the courtyard when it drew
up. Some tossed their antlers, others pawed the ground as the step
was let down and Orlando alighted. One, it is said, actually knelt in
the snow before her. She had not time to reach her hand towards
the knocker before both wings of the great door were ung open,
and there, with lights and torches held above their heads, were Mrs.
Grimsditch, Mr. Dupper, and a whole retinue of servants come to
greet her. But the orderly procession was interrupted rst by the
impetuosity of Canute,12 the elk-hound, who threw himself with
such ardour upon his mistress that he almost knocked her to the
ground; next, by the agitation of Mrs. Grimsditch, who, making as if
to curtsey, was overcome with emotion and could do no more than
gasp Milord! Milady! Milady! Milord! until Orlando comforted her
with a hearty kiss upon both her cheeks. 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. If any doubt there was in the human mind
the action of the deer and the dogs would have been enough to
dispel it, for the dumb creatures, as is well known, are far better
judges both of identity and character than we are. Moreover, said
Mrs. Grimsditch, over her dish of china tea, to Mr. Dupper that
night, if her Lord was a Lady now, she had never seen a lovelier
one, nor was there a penny piece to choose between them; one was
as well-favoured as the other; they were as like as two peaches on
one branch; which, said Mrs. Grimsditch, becoming con dential, she
had always had her suspicions (here she nodded her head very
mysteriously), which it was no surprise to her (here she nodded her
head very knowingly), and for her part, a very great comfort; for
what with the towels wanting mending and the curtains in the
chaplain’s parlour being moth-eaten round the fringes, it was time
they had a Mistress among them.
‘And some little masters and mistresses to come after her,’ Mr.
Dupper added, being privileged by virtue of his holy o ce to speak
his mind on such delicate matters as these.
So, while the old servants gossiped in the servants’ hall, Orlando
took a silver candle in her hand and roamed once more through the
halls, the galleries, the courts, the bedrooms; saw loom down at her
again the dark visage of this Lord Keeper, that Lord Chamberlain,
among her ancestors; sat now in this chair of state, now reclined on
that canopy of delight; observed the arras, how it swayed; watched
the huntsmen riding and Daphne ying; bathed her hand, as she had
loved to do as a child, in the yellow pool of light which the
moonlight made falling through the heraldic Leopard in the
window; slid along the polished planks of the gallery, the other side
of which was rough timber; touched this silk, that satin; fancied the
carved dolphins swam; brushed her hair with King James’ silver
brush; buried her face in the pot-pourri,13 which was made as the
Conqueror had taught them many hundred years ago and from the
same roses; looked at the garden and imagined the sleeping
crocuses, the dormant dahlias; saw the frail nymphs gleaming white
in the snow and the great yew hedges, thick as a house, black
behind them; saw the orangeries and the giant medlars; – all this
she saw, and each sight and sound, rudely as we write it down,
lled her heart with such a lust and balm of joy, that at length, tired
out, she entered the Chapel and sank into the old red arm-chair in
which her ancestors used to hear service. There she lit a cheroot
(’twas a habit she had brought back from the East) and opened the
Prayer Book.
 It was a little book bound in velvet, stitched with gold, which had
been held by Mary Queen of Scots on the sca old, and the eye of
faith could detect a brownish stain, said to be made of a drop of the
Royal blood.14 But what pious thoughts it roused in Orlando, what
evil passions it soothed asleep, who dare say, seeing that of all
communions this with the deity is the most inscrutable? Novelist,
poet, historian all falter with their hand on that door; nor does the
believer himself enlighten us, for is he more ready to die than other
people, or more eager to share his goods? Does he not keep as many
maids and carriage horses as the rest? and yet with it all, holds a
faith he says which should make goods a vanity and death desirable.
In the Queen’s prayer book, along with the blood-stain, was also a
lock of hair and a crumb of pastry; Orlando now added to these
keepsakes a ake of tobacco, and so, reading and smoking, was
moved by the humane jumble of them all – the hair, the pastry, the
bloodstain, the tobacco – to such a mood of contemplation as gave
her a reverent air suitable in the circumstances, though she had, it is
said, no tra c with the usual God. Nothing, however, can be more
arrogant, though nothing is commoner than to assume that of Gods
there is only one, and of religions none but the speaker’s. Orlando, it
seemed, had a faith of her own. With all the religious ardour in the
world, she now re ected upon her sins and the imperfections that
had crept into her spiritual state. The letter S, she re ected, is the
serpent in the poet’s Eden. Do what she would there were still too
many of these sinful reptiles in the rst stanzas of ‘The Oak Tree’.
But ‘S’ was nothing, in her opinion, compared with the termination
‘ing’. The present participle is the Devil himself, she thought (now
that we are in the place for believing in Devils). To evade such
temptations is the rst duty of the poet, she concluded, for as the
ear is the antechamber to the soul, poetry can adulterate and
destroy more surely than lust or gunpowder. The poet’s, then, is the
highest o ce of all, she continued. His words reach where others
fall short. A silly song of Shakespeare’s has done more for the poor
and the wicked than all the preachers and philanthropists in the
world. No time, no devotion, can be too great, therefore, which
makes the vehicle of our message less distorting. We must shape our
words till they are the thinnest integument for our thoughts.
Thoughts are divine, etc. Thus it is obvious that she was back in the
con nes of her own religion which time had only strengthened in
her absence, and was rapidly acquiring the intolerance of belief.
‘I am growing up,’ she thought, taking her taper at last. ‘I am
losing some illusions,’ she said, shutting Queen Mary’s book,
‘perhaps to acquire others,’ and she descended among the tombs
where the bones of her ancestors lay.
But even the bones of her ancestors, Sir Miles, Sir Gervase, and the
rest, had lost something of their sanctity since Rustum el Sadi had
waved his hand that night in the Asian mountains. Somehow the
fact that only three or four hundred years ago these skeletons had
been men with their way to make in the world like any modern
upstart, and that they had made it by acquiring houses and o ces,
garters and ribbands, as any other upstart does, while poets,
perhaps, and men of great mind and breeding had preferred the
quietude of the country, for which choice they paid the penalty by
extreme poverty, and now hawked broadsheets in the Strand, or
herded sheep in the elds, lled her with remorse. She thought of
the Egyptian pyramids and what bones lie beneath them as she
stood in the crypt; and the vast, empty hills which lie above the Sea
of Marmara seemed, for the moment, a ner dwelling-place than
this many-roomed mansion in which no bed lacked its quilt and no
silver dish its silver cover.
‘I am growing up,’ she thought, taking her taper. ‘I am losing my
illusions, perhaps to acquire new ones,’ and she paced down the
long gallery to her bedroom. It was a disagreeable process, and a
troublesome. But it was interesting, amazingly, she thought,
stretching her legs out to her log re (for no sailor was present), and
she reviewed, as if it were an avenue of great edi ces, the progress
of her own self along her own past.
How she had loved sound when she was a boy, and thought the
volley of tumultuous syllables from the lips the nest of all poetry.
Then – it was the e ect of Sasha and her disillusionment perhaps –
into this high frenzy was let fall some black drop, which turned her
rhapsody to sluggishness. Slowly there had opened within her
something intricate and many-chambered, which one must take a
torch to explore, in prose not verse; and she remembered how
passionately she had studied that doctor at Norwich, Browne,15
whose book was at her hand there. She had formed here in solitude
after her a air with Greene, or tried to form, for Heaven knows
these growths are agelong in coming, a spirit capable of resistance.
‘I will write’, she had said, ‘what I enjoy writing’; and so had
scratched out twenty-six volumes. Yet still, for all her travels and
adventures and profound thinkings and turnings this way and that,
she was only in process of fabrication. What the future might bring,
Heaven only knew. Change was incessant, and change perhaps
would never cease. High battlements of thought,16 habits that had
seemed durable as stone, went down like shadows at the touch of
another mind and left a naked sky and fresh stars twinkling in it.
Here she went to the window, and in spite of the cold could not help
unlatching it. She leant out into the damp night air. She heard a fox
bark in the woods, and the clutter of a pheasant trailing through the
branches. She heard the snow slither and op from the roof to the
ground. ‘By my life,’ she exclaimed, ‘this is a thousand times better
than Turkey. Rustum,’ she cried, as if she were arguing with the
gipsy (and in this new power of bearing an argument in mind and
continuing it with someone who was not there to contradict she
showed again the development of her soul), ‘you were wrong. This
is better than Turkey. Hair, pastry, tobacco – of what odds and ends
are we compounded,’ she said (thinking of Queen Mary’s prayer
book). ‘What a phantasmagoria the mind is and meeting-place of
dissemblables!17 At one moment we deplore our birth and state and
aspire to an ascetic exaltation; the next we are overcome by the
smell of some old garden path and weep to hear the thrushes sing.’
And so bewildered as usual by the multitude of things which call for
explanation and imprint their message without leaving any hint as
to their meaning, she threw her cheroot out of the window and went
to bed.
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 berries 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.
As her window gave on to the most central of the courts, as she
had given orders that she would see no one, as she knew no one and
was herself legally unknown, she was rst surprised at the shadow,
then indignant at it, then (when she looked up and saw what caused
it) overcome with merriment. For it was a familiar shadow, a
grotesque shadow, the shadow of no less a personage than the
Archduchess Harriet Griselda of Finster-Aarhorn and Scand-op-
Boom in the Roumanian territory. She was loping across the court in
her old black riding-habit and mantle as before. Not a hair of her
head was changed. This then was the woman who had chased her
from England! This was the eyrie of that obscene vulture18 – this the
fatal fowl herself! At the thought that she had ed all the way to
Turkey to avoid her seductions (now become excessively at),
Orlando laughed aloud. There was something inexpressibly comic in
the sight. She resembled, as Orlando had thought before, nothing so
much as a monstrous hare. She had the staring eyes, the lank
cheeks, the high headdress of that animal. She stopped now, much
as a hare sits erect in the corn when thinking itself unobserved, and
stared at Orlando, who stared back at her from the window. After
they had stared like this for a certain time, there was nothing for it
but to ask her in, and soon the two ladies were exchanging
compliments while the Archduchess struck the snow from her
mantle.
‘A plague on women,’ said Orlando to herself, going to the
cupboard to fetch a glass of wine, ‘they never leave one a moment’s
peace. A more ferreting, inquisiting, busybodying set of people don’t
exist. It was to escape this Maypole that I left England, and now’ –
here she turned to present the Archduchess with the salver, and
behold – in her place stood a tall gentleman in black. A heap of
clothes lay in the fender. She was alone with a man.
Recalled thus suddenly to a consciousness of her sex, which she
had completely forgotten, and of his, which was now remote enough
to be equally upsetting, Orlando felt seized with faintness.
‘La!’ she cried, putting her hand to her side, ‘how you frighten
me!’
‘Gentle creature,’ cried the Archduchess, falling on one knee and
at the same time pressing a cordial to Orlando’s lips, ‘forgive me for
the deceit I have practised on you!’
Orlando sipped the wine and the Archduke knelt and kissed her
hand.
In short, they acted the parts of man and woman for ten minutes
with great vigour and then fell into natural discourse. The
Archduchess (but she must in future be known as the Archduke) told
his story – that he was a man and always had been one; that he had
seen a portrait of Orlando and fallen hopelessly in love with him;
that to compass his ends, he had dressed as a woman and lodged at
the Baker’s shop; that he was desolated when he ed to Turkey; that
he had heard of her change and hastened to o er his services (here
he teed and heed intolerably). For to him, said the Archduke Harry,
she was and would ever be the Pink, the Pearl, the Perfection of her
sex. The three p’s would have been more persuasive if they had not
been interspersed with tee-hees and haw-haws of the strangest kind.
‘If this is love,’ said Orlando to herself, looking at the Archduke on
the other side of the fender, and now from the woman’s point of
view, ‘there is something highly ridiculous about it.’
Falling on his knees, the Archduke Harry made the most
passionate declaration of his suit. He told her that he had something
like twenty million ducats in a strong box at his castle. He had more
acres than any nobleman in England. The shooting was excellent: he
could promise her a mixed bag of ptarmigan and grouse such as no
English moor, or Scotch either, could rival. True, the pheasants had
su ered from the gape19 in his absence, and the does had slipped
their young, but that could be put right, and would be with her help
when they lived in Roumania together.
As he spoke, enormous tears formed in his rather prominent eyes
and ran down the sandy tracts of his long and lanky cheeks.
That men cry as frequently and as unreasonably as women,
Orlando knew from her own experience as a man; but she was
beginning to be aware that women should be shocked when men
display emotion in their presence, and so, shocked she was.
The Archduke apologised. He commanded himself su ciently to
say that he would leave her now, but would return on the following
day for his answer.
That was a Tuesday. He came on Wednesday; he came on
Thursday; he came on Friday; and he came on Saturday. It is true
that each visit began, continued, or concluded with a declaration of
love, but in between there was much room for silence. They sat on
either side of the replace and sometimes the Archduke knocked
over the re-irons and Orlando picked them up again.20 Then the
Archduke would bethink him how he had shot an elk in Sweden,
and Orlando would ask, was it a very big elk, and the Archduke
would say that it was not as big as the reindeer which he had shot
in Norway; and Orlando would ask, had he ever shot a tiger, and the
Archduke would say he had shot an albatross, and Orlando would
say (half hiding her yawn) was an albatross as big as an elephant,
and the Archduke would say – something very sensible, no doubt,
but Orlando heard it not, for she was looking at her writing-table,
out of the window, at the door. Upon which the Archduke would
say, ‘I adore you’, at the very same moment that Orlando said ‘Look,
it’s beginning to rain’, at which they were both much embarrassed,
and blushed scarlet, and could neither of them think what to say
next. Indeed, Orlando was at her wit’s end what to talk about and
had she not bethought her of a game called Fly Loo,21 at which
great sums of money can be lost with very little expense of spirit,
she would have had to marry him, she supposed; for how else to get
rid of him she knew not. By this device, however, and it was a
simple one, needing only three lumps of sugar and a su ciency of
ies, the embarrassment of conversation was overcome and the
necessity of marriage avoided. For now, the Archduke would bet her
ve hundred pounds to a tester that a y would settle on this lump
and not on that. Thus, they would have occupation for a whole
morning watching the ies (who were naturally sluggish at this
season and often spent an hour or so circling round the ceiling) until
at length some ne blue-bottle made his choice and the match was
won. Many hundreds of pounds changed hands between them at this
game, which the Archduke, who was a born gambler, swore was
every bit as good as horse racing, and vowed he could play at for
ever. But Orlando soon began to weary.
‘What’s the good of being a ne young woman in the prime of
life’, she asked, ‘if I have to pass all my mornings watching blue-
bottles with an Archduke?’
She began to detest the sight of sugar; ies made her dizzy. Some
way out of the di culty there must be, she supposed, but she was
still awkward in the arts of her sex, and as she could no longer
knock a man over the head or run him through the body with a
rapier, she could think of no better method than this. She caught a
blue-bottle, gently pressed the life out of it (it was half dead already,
or her kindness for the dumb creatures would not have permitted it)
and secured it by a drop of gum arabic to a lump of sugar. While the
Archduke was gazing at the ceiling, she deftly substituted this lump
for the one she had laid her money on, and crying ‘Loo Loo!’
declared that she had won her bet. Her reckoning was that the
Archduke, with all his knowledge of sport and horse-racing, would
detect the fraud and, as to cheat at Loo is the most heinous of
crimes, and men have been banished from the society of mankind to
that of apes in the tropics for ever because of it, she calculated that
he would be manly enough to refuse to have anything further to do
with her. But she misjudged the simplicity of the amiable nobleman.
He was no nice judge of ies. A dead y looked to him much the
same as a living one. She played the trick twenty times on him and
he paid her over £17,250 (which is about £40,885 : 6: 8 of our own
money) before Orlando cheated so grossly that even he could be
deceived no longer. When he realised the truth at last, a painful
scene ensued. The Archduke rose to his full height. He coloured
scarlet. Tears rolled down his cheeks one by one. That she had won
a fortune from him was nothing – she was welcome to it; that she
had deceived him was something – it hurt him to think her capable
of it; but that she had cheated at Loo was everything. To love a
woman who cheated at play was, he said, impossible. Here he broke
down completely. Happily, he said, recovering slightly, there were
no witnesses. She was, after all, only a woman, he said. In short, he
was preparing in the chivalry of his heart to forgive her and had
bent to ask her pardon for the violence of his language, when she
cut the matter short, as he stooped his proud head, by dropping a
small toad between his skin and his shirt.
 In justice to her, it must be said that she would in nitely have
preferred a rapier. Toads are clammy things to conceal about one’s
person a whole morning. But if rapiers are forbidden, one must have
recourse to toads. Moreover toads and laughter between them
sometimes do what cold steel cannot. She laughed. The Archduke
blushed. She laughed. The Archduke cursed. She laughed. The
Archduke slammed the door.
‘Heaven be praised!’ cried Orlando still laughing. She heard the
sound of chariot wheels driven at a furious pace down the
courtyard. She heard them rattle along the road. Fainter and fainter
the sound became. Now it faded away altogether.
‘I am alone,’ said Orlando, aloud since there was no one to hear.
That silence is more profound after noise still wants the
con rmation of science. But that loneliness is more apparent
directly after one has been made love to, many women would take
their oath. As the sound of the Archduke’s chariot wheels died
away, Orlando felt drawing further from her and further from her
an Archduke (she did not mind that), a fortune (she did not mind
that), a title (she did not mind that), the safety and circumstance of
married life (she did not mind that), but life she heard going from
her, and a lover. ‘Life and a lover,’ she murmured; and going to her
writing-table she dipped her pen in the ink and wrote:
‘Life and a lover’ – a line which did not scan and made no sense
with what went before – something about the proper way of dipping
sheep to avoid the scab.22 Reading it over she blushed and repeated,
 ‘Life and a lover.’ Then laying her pen aside she went into her
bedroom, stood in front of her mirror, and arranged her pearls
about her neck. Then since pearls do not show to advantage against
a morning gown of sprigged cotton, she changed to a dove-grey
ta eta; thence to one of peach bloom; thence to a wine-coloured
brocade. Perhaps a dash of powder was needed, and if her hair were
disposed – so – about her brow, it might become her. Then she
slipped her feet into pointed slippers, and drew an emerald ring
upon her nger. ‘Now,’ she said when all was ready and lit the silver
sconces on either side of the mirror. What woman would not have
kindled to see what Orlando saw then burning in the snow – for all
about the looking-glass were snowy lawns, and she was like a re, a
burning bush, and the candle ames about her head were silver
leaves; or again, the glass was green water, and she a mermaid,
slung with pearls, a siren in a cave, singing so that oarsmen leant
from their boats and fell down, down to embrace her; so dark, so
bright, so hard, so soft,23 was she, so astonishingly seductive that it
was a thousand pities that there was no one there to put it in plain
English, and say outright, ‘Damn it, Madam, you are loveliness
incarnate,’ which was the truth. Even Orlando (who had no conceit
of her person) knew it, for she smiled the involuntary smile which
women smile when their own beauty, which seems not their own,
forms like a drop falling or a fountain rising24 and confronts them
all of a sudden in the glass – this smile she smiled and then she
listened for a moment and heard only the leaves blowing and the
sparrows twittering, and then she sighed, ‘Life, a lover,’ and then
she turned on her heel with extraordinary rapidity; whipped her
pearls from her neck, stripped the satins from her back, stood erect
in the neat black silk knickerbockers of an ordinary nobleman, and
rang the bell. When the servant came, she told him to order a coach
and six to be in readiness instantly. She was summoned by urgent
a airs to London. Within an hour of the Archduke’s departure, o
she drove.25

And as she drove, we may seize the opportunity, since the

landscape was of a simple English kind which needs no description,
to draw the reader’s attention more particularly than we could at
the moment to one or two remarks which have slipped in here and
there in the course of the narrative. For example, it may have been
observed that Orlando hid her manuscripts when interrupted. Next,
that she looked long and intently in the glass; and now, as she
drove to London, one might notice her starting and suppressing a
cry when the horses galloped faster than she liked. Her modesty as
to her writing, her vanity as to her person, her fears for her safety
all seem to hint that what was said a short time ago about there
being no change in Orlando the man and Orlando the woman, was
ceasing to be altogether true. She was becoming a little more
modest, as women are, of her brains, and a little more vain, as
women are, of her person. Certain susceptibilities were asserting
themselves, and others were diminishing. The change of clothes
had, some philosophers will say, much to do with it. Vain tri es as
they seem, clothes have, they say, more important o ces than
merely to keep us warm. They change our view of the world and
the world’s view of us. For example, when Captain Bartolus saw
Orlando’s skirt, he had an awning stretched for her immediately,
pressed her to take another slice of beef, and invited her to go
ashore with him in the long-boat. These compliments would
certainly not have been paid her had her skirts, instead of owing,
been cut tight to her legs in the fashion of breeches. And when we
are paid compliments, it behoves us to make some return. Orlando
curtseyed; she complied; she attered the good man’s humours as
she would not have done had his neat breeches been a woman’s
skirts, and his braided coat a woman’s satin bodice. Thus, there is
much to support the view that it is clothes that wear us and not we
them; we may make them take the mould of arm or breast, but they
mould our hearts, our brains, our tongues to their liking. So, having
now worn skirts for a considerable time, a certain change was
visible in Orlando, which is to be found if the reader will look at
page III, even in her face.26 If we compare the picture of Orlando as
a man with that of Orlando as a woman we shall see that though
both are undoubtedly one and the same person, there are certain
changes. The man has his hand free to seize his sword, the woman
must use hers to keep the satins from slipping from her shoulders.
The man looks the world full in the face, as if it were made for his
uses and fashioned to his liking. The woman takes a sidelong glance
at it, full of subtlety, even of suspicion. Had they both worn the
same clothes, it is possible that their outlook might have been the
same.
That is the view of some philosophers and wise ones, but on the
whole, we incline to another. The di erence between the sexes is,
happily, one of great profundity. Clothes are but a symbol of
something hid deep beneath. It was a change in Orlando herself that
dictated her choice of a woman’s dress and of a woman’s sex. And
perhaps in this she was only expressing rather more openly than
usual – openness indeed was the soul of her nature – something that
happens to most people without being thus plainly expressed. For
here again, we come to a dilemma. Di erent though the sexes are,
they intermix. In every human being a vacillation from one sex to
the other takes place, and often it is only the clothes that keep the
male or female likeness, while underneath the sex is the very
opposite of what it is above. Of the complications and confusions
which thus result everyone has had experience; but here we leave
the general question and note only the odd e ect it had in the
particular case of Orlando herself.
For it was this mixture in her of man and woman, one being
uppermost and then the other, that often gave her conduct an
unexpected turn. The curious of her own sex would argue, for
example, if Orlando was a woman,27 how did she never take more
than ten minutes to dress? And were not her clothes chosen rather
at random, and sometimes worn rather shabby? And then they
would say, still, she has none of the formality of a man, or a man’s
love of power. She is excessively tender-hearted. She could not
endure to see a donkey beaten or a kitten drowned. Yet again, they
noted, she detested household matters, was up at dawn and out
among the elds in summer before the sun had risen. No farmer
knew more about the crops than she did. She could drink with the
best and liked games of hazard. She rode well and drove six horses
at a gallop over London Bridge. Yet again, though bold and active as
a man, it was remarked that the sight of another in danger brought
on the most womanly palpitations. She would burst into tears on
slight provocation. She was unversed in geography, found
mathematics intolerable, and held some caprices which are more
common among women than men, as for instance that to travel
south is to travel downhill. Whether, then, Orlando was most man
or woman, it is di cult to say and cannot now be decided. For her
coach was now rattling on the cobbles. She had reached her home in
the city. The steps were being let down; the iron gates were being
opened. She was entering her father’s house at Blackfriars, which,
though fashion was fast deserting that end of the town, was still a
pleasant, roomy mansion, with gardens running down to the river,
and a pleasant grove of nut trees to walk in.

Here she took up her lodging and began instantly to look about her
for what she had come in search of – that is to say, life and a lover.
About the rst there might be some doubt; the second she found
without the least di culty two days after her arrival. It was a
Tuesday that she came to town. On Thursday she went for a walk in
the Mall, as was then the habit of persons of quality. She had not
made more than a turn or two of the avenue before she was
observed by a little knot of vulgar people who go there to spy upon
their betters. As she came past them, a common woman carrying a
child at her breast stepped forward, peered familiarly into Orlando’s
face, and cried out, ‘Lawk upon us, if it ain’t the Lady Orlando!’ Her
companions came crowding round, and Orlando found herself in a
moment the centre of a mob of staring citizens and tradesmen’s
wives, all eager to gaze upon the heroine of the celebrated
lawsuit.28 Such was the interest that the case excited in the minds
of the common people. She might, indeed, have found herself
gravely discommoded by the pressure of the crowd – she had
forgotten that ladies are not supposed to walk in public places alone
– had not a tall gentleman at once stepped forward and o ered her
the protection of his arm. It was the Archduke. She was overcome
with distress and yet with some amusement at the sight. Not only
had this magnanimous nobleman forgiven her, but in order to show
that he took her levity with the toad in good part, he had procured
a jewel made in the shape of that reptile which he pressed upon her
with a repetition of his suit as he handed her to her coach.
What with the crowd, what with the Duke, what with the jewel,
she drove home in the vilest temper imaginable. Was it impossible
then to go for a walk without being half-su ocated, presented with
a toad set in emeralds, and asked in marriage by an Archduke? She
took a kinder view of the case next day when she found on her
breakfast table half a dozen billets29 from some of the greatest
ladies in the land – Lady Su olk, Lady Salisbury, Lady Chester eld,
Lady Tavistock, and others who reminded her in the politest manner
of old alliances between their families and her own, and desired the
honour of her acquaintance. Next day, which was a Saturday, many
of these great ladies waited on her in person. On Tuesday, about
noon, their footmen brought cards of invitation to various routs,30
dinners, and assemblies in the near future; so that Orlando was
launched without delay, and with some splash and foam at that,
upon the waters of London society.
To give a truthful account of London society at that or indeed at
any other time, is beyond the powers of the biographer or the
historian. Only those who have little need of the truth, and no
respect for it – the poets and the novelists – can be trusted to do it,
for this is one of the cases where the truth does not exist. Nothing
exists. The whole thing is a miasma – a mirage. To make our
meaning plain – Orlando would come home from one of these routs
at three or four in the morning with cheeks like a Christmas tree
and eyes like stars. She would untie a lace, pace the room a score of
times, untie another lace, stop, and pace the room again. Often the
sun would be blazing over Southwark chimneys before she could
persuade herself to get into bed, and there she would lie, pitching
and tossing, laughing and sighing for an hour or longer before she
slept at last. And what was all this stir about? Society. And what
had society said or done to throw a reasonable lady into such an
excitement? In plain language, nothing. Rack her memory as she
would, next day Orlando could never remember a single word to
magnify into the name something. Lord O. had been gallant. Lord A.
polite. The Marquis of C. charming. Mr. M. amusing. But when she
tried to recollect in what their gallantry, politeness, charm, or wit
had consisted, she was bound to suppose her memory at fault, for
she could not name a thing. It was the same always. Nothing
remained over the next day, yet the excitement of the moment was
intense. Thus we are forced to conclude that society is one of those
brews such as skilled housekeepers serve hot about Christmas time,
whose avour depends upon the proper mixing and stirring of a
dozen di erent ingredients. Take one out, and it is in itself insipid.
Take away Lord O., Lord A., Lord C, or Mr. M. and separately each
is nothing. Stir them all together and they combine to give o the
most intoxicating of avours, the most seductive of scents. Yet this
intoxication, this seductiveness, entirely evade our analysis. At one
and the same time, therefore, society is everything and society is
nothing. Society is the most powerful concoction in the world and
society has no existence whatsoever. Such monsters the poets and
the novelists alone can deal with; with such something-nothings
their works are stu ed out to prodigious size; and to them with the
best will in the world we are content to leave it.
Following the example of our predecessors, therefore, we will only
say that society in the reign of Queen Anne31 was of unparalleled
brilliance. To have the entry there was the aim of every well-bred
person. The graces were supreme. Fathers instructed their sons,
mothers their daughters. No education was complete for either sex
which did not include the science of deportment, the art of bowing
and curtseying, the management of the sword and the fan, the care
of the teeth, the conduct of the leg, the exibility of the knee, the
proper methods of entering and leaving the room, with a thousand
etceteras, such as will immediately suggest themselves to anybody
who has himself been in society. Since Orlando had won the praise
of Queen Elizabeth for the way she handed a bowl of rose water as a
boy, it must be supposed that she was su ciently expert to pass
muster. Yet it is true that there was an absent-mindedess about her
which sometimes made her clumsy; she was apt to think of poetry
when she should have been thinking of ta eta; her walk was a little
too much of a stride for a woman, perhaps, and her gestures, being
abrupt, might endanger a cup of tea on occasion.
Whether this slight disability was enough to counterbalance the
splendour of her bearing, or whether she inherited a drop too much
of that black humour which ran in the veins of all her race, certain
it is that she had not been in the world more than a score of times
before she might have been heard to ask herself, had there been
anybody but her spaniel Pippin32 to hear her, ‘What the devil is the
matter with me?’ The occasion was Tuesday, the 16th of June 1712;
she had just returned from a great ball at Arlington House; the dawn
was in the sky, and she was pulling o her stockings. ‘I don’t care if
I never meet another soul as long as I live,’ cried Orlando, bursting
into tears. Lovers she had in plenty, but life, which is, after all, of
some importance in its way, escaped her. ‘Is this’, she asked – but
there was none to answer, ‘is this’, she nished her sentence all the
same, ‘what people call life?’ The spaniel raised her forepaw in
token of sympathy. The spaniel licked Orlando with her tongue.
Orlando stroked the spaniel with her hand. Orlando kissed the
spaniel with her lips. In short, there was the truest sympathy
between them that can be between a dog and its mistress, and yet it
cannot be denied that the dumbness of animals is a great
impediment to the re nements of intercourse. They wag their tails;
they bow the front part of the body and elevate the hind; they roll,
they jump, they paw, they whine, they bark, they slobber, they have
all sorts of ceremonies and arti ces of their own, but the whole
thing is of no avail, since speak they cannot. Such was her quarrel,
she thought, setting the dog gently on to the oor, with the great
people at Arlington House. They, too, wag their tails, bow, roll,
jump, paw, and slobber, but talk they cannot. ‘All these months that
I’ve been out in the world’, said Orlando, pitching one stocking
across the room, ‘I’ve heard nothing but what Pippin might have
said. I’m cold. I’m happy. I’m hungry. I’ve caught a mouse. I’ve
buried a bone. Please kiss my nose.’ And it was not enough.
How, in so short a time, she had passed from intoxication to
disgust we will only seek to explain by supposing that this
mysterious composition which we call society, is nothing absolutely
good or bad in itself, but has a spirit in it, volatile but potent, which
either makes you drunk when you think it, as Orlando thought it,
delightful, or gives you a headache when you think it, as Orlando
thought it, repulsive. That the faculty of speech has much to do with
it either way, we take leave to doubt. Often a dumb hour is the most
ravishing of all; brilliant wit can be tedious beyond description. But
to the poets we leave it, and so on with our story.
Orlando threw the second stocking after the rst and went to bed
dismally enough, determined that she would forswear society for
ever. But again as it turned out, she was too hasty in coming to her
conclusions. For the very next morning she woke to nd, among the
usual cards of invitation upon her table, one from a certain great
Lady, the Countess of R. Having determined overnight that she
would never go into society again, we can only explain Orlando’s
behaviour – she sent a messenger hot-foot to R— House to say that
she would attend her Ladyship with all the pleasure in the world –
by the fact that she was still su ering from the e ect of three
honeyed words dropped into her ear on the deck of the Enamoured
Lady by Captain Nicholas Benedict Bartolus as they sailed down the
Thames. Addison, Dryden, Pope, he had said, pointing to the Cocoa
Tree, and Addison, Dryden, Pope had chimed in her head like an
incantation ever since. Who can credit such folly? but so it was. All
her experience with Nick Greene had taught her nothing. Such
names still exercised over her the most powerful fascination.
Something, perhaps, we must believe in, and as Orlando, we have
said, had no belief in the usual divinities she bestowed her credulity
upon great men – yet with a distinction. Admirals, soldiers,
statesmen, moved her not at all. But the very thought of a great
writer stirred her to such a pitch of belief that she almost believed
him to be invisible.33 Her instinct was a sound one. One can only
believe entirely, perhaps, in what one cannot see. The little glimpse
she had of these great men from the deck of the ship was of the
nature of a vision. That the cup was china, or the gazette paper, she
doubted. When Lord O. said one day that he had dined with Dryden
the night before, she atly disbelieved him. Now, the Lady R.’s
reception room had the reputation of being the antechamber to the
presence room of genius; it was the place where men and women
met to swing censers and chant hymns to the bust of genius in a
niche in the wall. Sometimes the God himself vouchsafed his
presence for a moment. Intellect alone admitted the suppliant, and
nothing (so the report ran) was said inside that was not witty.
It was thus with great trepidation that Orlando entered the room.
She found a company already assembled in a semicircle round the
re. Lady R., an oldish lady, of dark complexion, with a black lace
mantilla on her head, was seated in a great arm-chair in the centre.
Thus being somewhat deaf, she could control the conversation on
both sides of her. On both sides of her sat men and women of the
highest distinction. Every man, it was said, had been a Prime
Minister and every woman, it was whispered, had been the mistress
of a king. Certain it is that all were brilliant, and all were famous.
Orlando took her seat with a deep reverence in silence … After
three hours, she curtseyed profoundly and left.
But what, the reader may ask with some exasperation, happened
in between? In three hours, such a company must have said the
wittiest, the profoundest, the most interesting things in the world.
So it would seem indeed. But the fact appears to be that they said
nothing. It is a curious characteristic which they share with all the
most brilliant societies that the world has seen. Old Madame du
De and34 and her friends talked for fty years without stopping.
And of it all, what remains? Perhaps three witty sayings. So that we
are at liberty to suppose either that nothing was said, or that
nothing witty was said, or that the fraction of three witty sayings
lasted eighteen thousand two hundred and fty nights, which does
not leave a liberal allowance of wit for any one of them.
The truth would seem to be – if we dare use such a word in such a
connection – that all these groups of people lie under an
enchantment. The hostess is our modern Sibyl.35 She is a witch who
lays her guests under a spell. In this house they think themselves
happy; in that witty; in a third profound. It is all an illusion (which
is nothing against it, for illusions are the most valuable and
necessary of all things, and she who can create one is among the
world’s greatest benefactors), but as it is notorious that illusions are
shattered by con ict with reality, so no real happiness, no real wit,
no real profundity are tolerated where the illusion prevails. This
serves to explain why Madame du De and said no more than three
witty things in the course of fty years. Had she said more, her
circle would have been destroyed. The witticism, as it left her lips,
bowled over the current conversation as a cannon ball lays low the
violets and the daisies. When she made her famous ‘mot de Saint
Denis’ the very grass was singed. Disillusionment and desolation
followed. Not a word was uttered. ‘Spare us another such, for
Heaven’s sake, Madame!’ her friends cried with one accord. And she
obeyed. For almost seventeen years she said nothing memorable and
all went well. The beautiful counterpane of illusion lay unbroken on
her circle as it lay unbroken on the circle of Lady R. The guests
thought that they were happy, thought that they were witty,
thought that they were profound, and, as they thought this, other
people thought it still more strongly; and so it got about that
nothing was more delightful than one of Lady R.’s assemblies;
everyone envied those who were admitted; those who were
admitted envied themselves because other people envied them; and
so there seemed no end to it – except that which we have now to
relate.
For about the third time Orlando went there a certain incident
occurred. She was still under the illusion that she was listening to
the most brilliant epigrams in the world, though, as a matter of fact,
old General C. was only saying, at some length, how the gout had
left his left leg and gone to his right, while Mr. L. interrupted when
any proper name was mentioned, ‘R.? Oh! I know Billy R. as well as
I know myself. S.? My dearest friend. T.? Stayed with him a
fortnight in Yorkshire’ – which, such is the force of illusion, sounded
like the wittiest repartee, the most searching comment upon human
life, and kept the company in a roar; when the door opened and a
little gentleman entered whose name Orlando did not catch. Soon a
curiously disagreeable sensation came over her. To judge from their
faces, the rest began to feel it as well. One gentleman said there was
a draught. The Marchioness of C. feared a cat must be under the
sofa. It was as if their eyes were being slowly opened after a
pleasant dream and nothing met them but a cheap wash-stand and a
dirty counter-pane. It was as if the fumes of some delicious wine
were slowly leaving them. Still the General talked and still Mr. L.
remembered. But it became more and more apparent how red the
General’s neck was, how bald Mr. L.’s head was. As for what they
said – nothing more tedious and trivial could be imagined.
Everybody dgeted and those who had fans yawned behind them.
At last Lady R. rapped with hers upon the arm of her great chair.
Both gentlemen stopped talking.
Then the little gentleman said,
He said next,
He said nally,*
Here, it cannot be denied, was true wit, true wisdom, true
profundity. The company was thrown into complete dismay. One
such saying was bad enough; but three, one after another, on the
same evening! No society could survive it.
‘Mr. Pope,’ said old Lady R. in a voice trembling with sarcastic
fury, ‘you are pleased to be witty.’ Mr. Pope ushed red. Nobody
spoke a word. They sat in dead silence some twenty minutes. Then,
one by one, they rose and slunk from the room. That they would
ever come back after such an experience was doubtful. Link-boys36
could be heard calling their coaches all down South Audley Street.
Doors were slammed and carriages drove o . Orlando found herself
near Mr. Pope on the staircase. His lean and misshapen frame was
shaken by a variety of emotions. Darts of malice, rage, triumph, wit,
and terror (he was shaking like a leaf) shot from his eyes. He looked
like some squat reptile set with a burning topaz in its forehead. At
the same time, the strangest tempest of emotion seized now upon
the luckless Orlando. A disillusionment so complete as that in icted
not an hour ago leaves the mind rocking from side to side.
Everything appears ten times more bare and stark than before. It is a
moment fraught with the highest danger for the human spirit.
Women turn nuns and men priests in such moments. In such
moments, rich men sign away their wealth; and happy men cut their
throats with carving knives. Orlando would have done all willingly,
but there was a rasher thing still for her to do, and this she did. She
invited Mr. Pope to come home with her.
For if it is rash to walk into a lion’s den unarmed, rash to navigate
the Atlantic in a rowing boat, rash to stand on one foot on the top of
St. Paul’s, it is still more rash to go home alone with a poet. A poet
is Atlantic and lion in one. While one drowns us the other gnaws us.
If we survive the teeth, we succumb to the waves. A man who can
destroy illusions is both beast and ood. Illusions are to the soul
what atmosphere is to the earth. Roll up that tender air and the
plant dies, the colour fades. The earth we walk on is a parched
cinder. It is marl we tread and ery cobbles scorch our feet. By the
truth we are undone. Life is a dream. ‘Tis waking that kills us. He
who robs us of our dreams robs us of our life – (and so on for six
pages if you will, but the style is tedious and may well be dropped).
On this showing, however, Orlando should have been a heap of
cinders by the time the chariot drew up at her house in Blackfriars.
That she was still esh and blood, though certainly exhausted, is
entirely due to a fact to which we drew attention earlier in the
narrative. The less we see the more we believe. Now the streets that
lie between Mayfair and Blackfriars were at that time very
imperfectly lit. True, the lighting was a great improvement upon
that of the Elizabethan age. Then the benighted traveller had to
trust to the stars or the red ame of some night watchman to save
him from the gravel pits at Park Lane or the oak woods where swine
rootled in the Tottenham Court Road. But even so it wanted much
of our modern e ciency. Lamp-posts lit with oil-lamps occurred
every two hundred yards or so, but between lay a considerable
stretch of pitch darkness. Thus for ten minutes Orlando and Mr.
Pope would be in blackness; and then for about half a minute again
in the light. A very strange state of mind was thus bred in Orlando.
As the light faded, she began to feel steal over her the most
delicious balm. ‘This is indeed a very great honour for a young
woman, to be driving with Mr. Pope’ she began to think, looking at
the outline of his nose. ‘I am the most blessed of my sex. Half an
inch from me – indeed, I feel the knot of his knee ribbons pressing
against my thigh – is the greatest wit in Her Majesty’s dominions.
Future ages will think of us with curiosity and envy me with fury.’
Here came the lamp-post again. ‘What a foolish wretch I am!’ she
thought. ‘There is no such thing as fame and glory. Ages to come
will never cast a thought on me or on Mr. Pope either. What’s an
“age”, indeed? What are “we”?’ and their progress through Berkeley
Square seemed the groping of two blind ants, momentarily thrown
together without interest or concern in common, across a blackened
desert. She shivered. But here again was darkness. Her illusion
revived. ‘How noble his brow is,’ she thought (mistaking a hump on
a cushion for Mr. Pope’s forehead in the darkness). ‘What a weight
of genius lives in it! What wit, wisdom, and truth – what a wealth of
all those jewels, indeed, for which people are ready to barter their
lives! Yours is the only light that burns for ever. But for you the
human pilgrimage would be performed in utter darkness’; (here the
coach gave a great lurch as it fell into a rut in Park Lane) ‘without
genius we should be upset and undone. Most august, most lucid of
beams’ – thus she was apostrophising the hump on the cushion
when they drove beneath one of the street lamps in Berkeley Square
and she realised her mistake. Mr. Pope had a forehead no bigger
than another man’s. ‘Wretched man,’ she thought, ‘how you have
deceived me! I took that hump for your forehead. When one sees
you plain, how ignoble, how despicable you are! Deformed and
weakly, there is nothing to venerate in you, much to pity, most to
despise.’
Again they were in darkness and her anger became modi ed
directly she could see nothing but the poet’s knees.
‘But it is I that am a wretch’ she re ected, once they were in
complete obscurity again, ‘for base as you may be, am I not still
baser? It is you who nourish and protect me, you who scare the wild
beast, frighten the savage, make me clothes of the silkworm’s wool,
and carpets of the sheep’s. If I want to worship, have you not
provided me with an image of yourself and set it in the sky? Are not
evidences of your care everywhere? How humble, how grateful,
how docile, should I not be, therefore? Let it be all my joy to serve,
honour, and obey you.’
Here they reached the big lamp-post at the corner of what is now
Piccadilly Circus. The light blazed in her eyes, and she saw, besides
some degraded creatures of her own sex,37 two wretched pigmies on
a stark desert land. Both were naked, solitary, and defenceless. The
one was powerless to help the other. Each had enough to do to look
after itself. Looking Mr. Pope full in the face, ‘It is equally vain’, she
thought, ‘for you to think you can protect me, or for me to think I
can worship you. The light of truth beats upon us without shadow,
and the light of truth is damnably unbecoming to us both.’
All this time, of course, they went on talking agreeably, as people
of birth and education use, about the Queen’s temper and the Prime
Minister’s gout, while the coach went from light to darkness down
the Haymarket, along the Strand, up Fleet Street, and reached, at
length, her house in Blackfriars. For some time the dark spaces
between the lamps had been becoming brighter and the lamps
themselves less bright – that is to say, the sun was rising, and it was
in the equable but confused light of a summer’s morning in which
everything is seen but nothing is seen distinctly that they alighted,
Mr. Pope handing Orlando from her carriage and Orlando
curtseying Mr. Pope to precede her into her mansion with the most
scrupulous attention to the rites of the Graces.
From the foregoing passage, however, it must not be supposed that
genius (but the disease is now stamped out in the British Isles, the
late Lord Tennyson, it is said, being the last person to su er from it)
is constantly alight, for then we should see everything plain and
perhaps should be scorched to death in the process. Rather it
resembles the lighthouse in its working, which sends one ray and
then no more for a time; save that genius is much more capricious
in its manifestations and may ash six or seven beams in quick
succession (as Mr. Pope did that night) and then lapse into darkness
for a year or for ever. To steer by its beams is therefore impossible,
and when the dark spell is on them men of genius are, it is said,
much like other people.
It was happy for Orlando, though at rst disappointing, that this
should be so, for she now began to live much in the company of
men of genius. Nor were they so di erent from the rest of us as one
might have supposed. Addison, Pope, Swift, proved, she found, to be
fond of tea. They liked arbours. They collected little bits of coloured
glass. They adored grottos. Rank was not distasteful to them. Praise
was delightful. They wore plum-coloured suits one day and grey
another. Mr. Swift had a ne malacca cane. Mr. Addison scented his
handkerchiefs. Mr. Pope su ered with his head. A piece of gossip
did not come amiss. Nor were they without their jealousies. (We are
jotting down a few re ections that came to Orlando higgledy-
piggledy.) At rst, she was annoyed with herself for noticing such
tri es, and kept a book in which to write down their memorable
sayings, but the page remained empty. All the same, her spirits
revived, and she took to tearing up her cards of invitation to great
parties; kept her evenings free; began to look forward to Mr. Pope’s
visit, to Mr. Addison’s, to Mr. Swift’s – and so on and so on. If the
reader will here refer to the Rape of the Lock, to the Spectator, to
Gulliver’s Travels, he will understand precisely what these mysterious
words may mean. Indeed, biographers and critics might save
themselves all their labours if readers would only take this advice.
For when we read:

Whether the Nymph shall break Diana’s Law,

Or some frail China Jar receive a Flaw,

Or stain her Honour, or her new Brocade,

Forget her Pray’rs or miss a Masquerade,

Or lose her Heart, or Necklace, at a Ball.38

– we know as if we heard him how Mr. Pope’s tongue ickered like

a lizard’s, how his eyes ashed, how his hand trembled, how he
loved, how he lied, how he su ered. In short, every secret of a
writer’s soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind
is written large in his works, yet we require critics to explain the
one and biographers to expound the other. That time hangs heavy
on people’s hands is the only explanation of the monstrous growth.
So, now that we have read a page or two of the Rape of the Lock,
we know exactly why Orlando was so much amused and so much
frightened and so very bright-cheeked and bright-eyed that
afternoon.
Mrs. Nelly then knocked at the door to say that Mr. Addison
waited on her Ladyship. At this, Mr. Pope got up with a wry smile,
made his congee,39 and limped o . In came Mr. Addison. Let us, as
he takes his seat, read the following passage from the Spectator:40
‘I consider woman as a beautiful, romantic animal, that may be
adorned with furs and feathers, pearls and diamonds, ores and silks.
The lynx shall cast its skin at her feet to make her a tippet, the
peacock, parrot and swan shall pay contributions to her mu ; the
sea shall be searched for shells, and the rocks for gems, and every
part of nature furnish out its share towards the embellishment of a
creature that is the most consummate work of it. All this, I shall
indulge them in, but as for the petticoat I have been speaking of, I
neither can, nor will allow it.’
We hold that gentleman, cocked hat and all, in the hollow of our
hands. Look once more into the crystal. Is he not clear to the very
wrinkle in his stocking? Does not every ripple and curve of his wit
lie exposed before us, and his benignity and his timidity and his
urbanity and the fact that he would marry a Countess and die very
respectably in the end? All is clear. And when Mr. Addison has said
his say, there is a terri c rap at the door, and Mr. Swift, who had
these arbitrary ways with him, walks in unannounced. One moment,
where is Gulliver’s Travels?41 Here it is! Let us read a passage from
the voyage to the Houyhnhnms:
‘I enjoyed perfect Health of Body and Tranquillity of Mind; I did
not nd the Treachery or Inconstancy of a Friend, nor the Injuries of
a secret or open Enemy. I had no occasion of bribing, attering or
pimping, to procure the Favour of any great Man or of his Minion. I
wanted no Fence against Fraud or Oppression; Here was neither
Physician to destroy my Body, nor Lawyer to ruin my Fortune; No
Informer to watch my Words, and Actions, or forge Accusations
against me for Hire: Here were no Gibers, Censurers, Backbiters,
Pickpockets, Highwaymen, House-breakers, Attorneys, Bawds,
Bu oons, Gamesters, Politicians, Wits, splenetick tedious Talkers …’
But stop, stop your iron pelt of words, lest you ay us all alive,
and yourself too! Nothing can be plainer than that violent man. He
is so coarse and yet so clean; so brutal, yet so kind; scorns the whole
world, yet talks baby language to a girl, and will die, can we doubt
it? in a madhouse.
So Orlando poured out tea for them all; and sometimes, when the
weather was ne, she carried them down to the country with her,
and feasted them royally in the Round Parlour,42 which she had
hung with their pictures all in a circle, so that Mr. Pope could not
say that Mr. Addison came before him, or the other way about. They
were very witty, too (but their wit is all in their books), and taught
her the most important part of style, which is the natural run of the
voice in speaking – a quality which none that has not heard it can
imitate, not Greene even, with all his skill; for it is born of the air,
and breaks like a wave on the furniture, and rolls and fades away,
and is never to be recaptured, least of all by those who prick up
their ears, half a century later, and try. They taught her this, merely
by the cadence of their voices in speech; so that her style changed
somewhat, and she wrote some very pleasant, witty verses and
characters in prose. And so she lavished her wine on them and put
bank-notes, which they took very kindly, beneath their plates at
dinner,43 and accepted their dedications, and thought herself highly
honoured by the exchange.
Thus time ran on, and Orlando could often be heard saying to
herself with an emphasis which might, perhaps, make the hearer a
little suspicious, ‘Upon my soul, what a life this is!’ (For she was still
in search of that commodity.) But circumstances soon forced her to
consider the matter more narrowly.
One day she was pouring out tea for Mr. Pope while, as anyone
can tell from the verses quoted above, he sat very bright-eyed,
observant, and all crumpled up in a chair by her side.
‘Lord,’ she thought, as she raised the sugar tongs, ‘how women in
ages to come will envy me! And yet—’ she paused; for Mr. Pope
needed her attention. And yet – let us nish her thought for her –
when anybody says ‘How future ages will envy me’, it is safe to say
that they are extremely uneasy at the present moment. Was this life
quite so exciting, quite so attering, quite so glorious as it sounds
when the memoir writer has done his work upon it? For one thing,
Orlando had a positive hatred of tea; for another, the intellect,
divine as it is, and all-worshipful, has a habit of lodging in the most
seedy of carcases, and often, alas, acts the cannibal among the other
faculties so that often, where the Mind is biggest, the Heart, the
Senses, Magnanimity, Charity, Tolerance, Kindliness, and the rest of
them scarcely have room to breathe. Then the high opinion poets
have of themselves; then the low one they have of others; then the
enmities, injuries, envies, and repartees in which they are constantly
engaged; then the volubility with which they impart them; then the
rapacity with which they demand sympathy for them; all this, one
may whisper, lest the wits may overhear us, makes pouring out tea a
more precarious and, indeed, arduous occupation than is generally
allowed. Added to which (we whisper again lest the women may
overhear us), there is a little secret which men share among them;
Lord Chester eld44 whispered it to his son with strict injunctions to
secrecy, ‘Women are but children of a larger growth s A man of
sense only tri es with them, plays with them, humours and atters
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 pouring out tea is a curious one. A
woman knows very well that, though a wit sends her his poems,
praises her judgment, solicits her criticism, and drinks her tea, this
by no means signi es that he respects her opinions, admires her
understanding, or will refuse, though the rapier is denied him, to
run her through the body with his pen. All this, we say, whisper it
as low as we can, may have leaked out by now; so that even with
the cream jug suspended and the sugar tongs distended the ladies
may dget a little, look out of the window a little, yawn a little, and
so let the sugar fall with a great plop – as Orlando did now – into
Mr. Pope’s tea. Never was any mortal so ready to suspect an insult
or so quick to avenge one as Mr. Pope. He turned to Orlando and
presented her instantly with the rough draught of a certain famous
line in the ‘Characters of Women’.45 Much polish was afterwards
bestowed on it, but even in the original it was striking enough.
Orlando received it with a curtsey. Mr. Pope left her with a bow.
Orlando, to cool her cheeks, for really she felt as if the little man
had struck her, strolled in the nut grove at the bottom of the garden.
Soon the cool breezes did their work. To her amazement she found
that she was hugely relieved to nd herself alone. She watched the
merry boatloads rowing up the river. No doubt the sight put her in
mind of one or two incidents in her past life. She sat herself down in
profound meditation beneath a ne willow tree. There she sat till
the stars were in the sky. Then she rose, turned, and went into the
house, where she sought her bedroom and locked the door. Now she
opened a cupboard in which hung still many of the clothes she had
worn as a young man of fashion, and from among them she chose a
black velvet suit richly trimmed with Venetian lace. It was a little
out of fashion, indeed, but it tted her to perfection and dressed in
it she looked the very gure of a noble Lord. She took a turn or two
before the mirror to make sure that her petticoats had not lost her
the freedom of her legs, and then let herself secretly out of doors.
It was a ne night early in April. A myriad stars mingling with the
light of a sickle moon, which again was enforced by the street
lamps, made a light in nitely becoming to the human countenance
and to the architecture of Mr. Wren. Everything appeared in its
tenderest form, yet, just as it seemed on the point of dissolution,
some drop of silver sharpened it to animation. Thus it was that talk
should be, thought Orlando (indulging in foolish reverie); that
society should be, that friendship should be, that love should be.
For, Heaven knows why, just as we have lost faith in human
intercourse some random collocation of barns and trees or a
haystack and a waggon presents us with so perfect a symbol of what
is unattainable that we begin the search again.
She entered Leicester Square as she made these observations. The
buildings had an airy yet formal symmetry not theirs by day. The
canopy of the sky seemed most dexterously washed in to ll up the
outline of roof and chimney. A young woman who sat dejectedly
with one arm drooping by her side, the other reposing in her lap, on
a seat beneath a plane tree in the middle of the square seemed the
very gure of grace, simplicity, and desolation. Orlando swept her
hat o to her in the manner of a gallant paying his addresses to a
lady of fashion in a public place. The young woman raised her head.
It was of the most exquisite shapeliness. The young woman raised
her eyes. Orlando saw them to be of a lustre such as is sometimes
seen on teapots but rarely in a human face. Through this silver glaze
the young woman looked up at him (for a man he was to her)
appealing, hoping, trembling, fearing. She rose; she accepted his
arm. For -need we stress the point? – she was of the tribe which
nightly burnishes their wares, and sets them in order on the
common counter to wait the highest bidder. She led Orlando to the
room in Gerrard Street which was her lodging. To feel her hanging
lightly yet like a suppliant on her arm, roused in Orlando all the
feelings which become a man. She looked, she felt, she talked like
one. Yet, having been so lately a woman herself, she suspected that
the girl’s timidity and her hesitating answers and the very fumbling
with the key in the latch and the fold of her cloak and the droop of
her wrist were all put on to gratify her masculinity. Upstairs they
went, and the pains which the poor creature had been at to decorate
her room and hide the fact that she had no other deceived Orlando
not a moment. The deception roused her scorn; the truth roused her
pity. One thing showing through the other bred the oddest
assortment of feeling, so that she did not know whether to laugh or
to cry. Meanwhile Nell, as the girl called herself, unbuttoned her
gloves; carefully concealed the left-hand thumb, which wanted
mending; then drew behind a screen, where, perhaps, she rouged
her cheeks, arranged her clothes, xed a new kerchief round her
neck – all the time prattling as women do, to amuse her lover,
though Orlando could have sworn, from the tone of her voice, that
her thoughts were elsewhere. When all was ready, out she came,
prepared — but here Orlando could stand it no longer. In the
strangest torment of anger, merriment, and pity she ung o all
disguise and admitted herself a woman.
At this, Nell burst into such a roar of laughter as might have been
heard across the way.
‘Well, my dear,’ she said, when she had somewhat recovered, ‘I’m
by no means sorry to hear it. For the plain Dunstable of the matter46
is’ (and it was remarkable how soon, on discovering that they were
of the same sex, her manner changed and she dropped her plaintive,
appealing ways), ‘the plain Dunstable of the matter is, that I’m not
in the mood for the society of the other sex to-night. Indeed, I’m in
the devil of a x.’ Whereupon, drawing up the re and stirring a
bowl of punch, she told Orlando the whole story of her life. Since it
is Orlando’s life that engages us at present, we need not relate the
adventures of the other lady, but it is certain that Orlando had never
known the hours speed faster or more merrily, though Mistress Nell
had not a particle of wit about her, and when the name of Mr. Pope
came up in talk asked innocently if he were connected with the
perruque maker of that name in Jermyn Street. Yet, to Orlando,
such is the charm of ease and the seduction of beauty, this poor
girl’s talk, larded though it was with the commonest expressions of
the street corners, tasted like wine after the ne phrases she had
been used to, and she was forced to the conclusion that there was
something in the sneer of Mr. Pope, in the condescension of Mr.
Addison, and in the secret of Lord Chester eld which took away her
relish for the society of wits, deeply though she must continue to
respect their works.
These poor creatures, she ascertained, for Nell brought Prue, and
Prue Kitty, and Kitty Rose, had a society of their own of which they
now elected her a member. Each would tell the story of the
adventures which had landed her in her present way of life. Several
were the natural daughters of earls and one was a good deal nearer
than she should have been to the King’s person. None was too
wretched or too poor but to have some ring or handkerchief in her
pocket which stood her in lieu of pedigree. So they would draw
round the punch-bowl which Orlando made it her business to
furnish generously, and many were the ne tales they told and
many the amusing observations they made, for it cannot be denied
that when women get together – but hist – they are always careful
to see that the doors are shut and that not a word of it gets into
print. All they desire is – but hist again – is that not a man’s step on
the stair? All they desire, we were about to say when the gentleman
took the very words out of our mouths. Women have no desires,
says this gentleman, coming into Nell’s parlour; only a ectations.
Without desires (she has served him and he is gone) their
conversation cannot be of the slightest interest to anyone. ‘It is well
known’ says Mr. S. W., ‘that when they lack the stimulus of the
other sex, women can nd nothing to say to each other. When they
are alone, they do not talk, they scratch.’ And since they cannot talk
together and scratching cannot continue without interruption and it
is well known (Mr. T. R. has proved it) ‘that women are incapable of
any feeling of a ection for their own sex and hold each other in the
greatest aversion’, what can we suppose that women do when they
seek out each other’s society?47
As that is not a question that can engage the attention of a sensible
man, let us, who enjoy the immunity of all biographers and
historians from any sex whatever, pass it over, and merely state that
Orlando professed great enjoyment in the society of her own sex,
and leave it to the gentlemen to prove, as they are very fond of
doing, that this is impossible.
But to give an exact and particular account of Orlando’s life at this
time becomes more and more out of the question. As we peer and
grope in the ill-lit, ill-paved, ill-ventilated courtyards that lay about
Gerrard Street and Drury Lane at that time, we seem now to catch
sight of her and then again to lose it. The task is made still more
di cult by the fact that she found it convenient at this time to
change frequently from one set of clothes to another. Thus she often
occurs in contemporary memoirs as ‘Lord’ So-and-so, who was in
fact her cousin; her bounty is ascribed to him, and it is he who is
said to have written the poems that were really hers. She had, it
seems, no di culty in sustaining the di erent parts, for her sex
changed far more frequently than those who have worn only one set
of clothing can conceive; nor can there be any doubt that she reaped
a twofold harvest by this device; the pleasures of life were increased
and its experiences multiplied. For the probity of breeches she
exchanged the seductiveness of petticoats and enjoyed the love of
both sexes equally.
So then one may sketch her spending her morning in a China robe
of ambiguous gender among her books; then receiving a client or
two (for she had many scores of suppliants) in the same garment;
then she would take a turn in the garden and clip the nut trees48 –
for which knee-breeches were convenient; then she would change
into a owered ta eta which best suited a drive to Richmond and a
proposal of marriage from some great nobleman; and so back again
to town, where she would don a snu -coloured gown like a lawyer’s
and visit the courts to hear how her cases were doing – for her
fortune was wasting hourly and the suits seemed no nearer
consummation than they had been a hundred years ago; and so,
nally, when night came, she would more often than not become a
nobleman complete from head to toe and walk the streets in search
of adventure.
 Returning from some of these junketings – of which there were
many stories told at the time, as, that she fought a duel, served on
one of the King’s ships as a captain, was seen to dance naked on a
balcony, and ed with a certain lady to the Low Countries where
the lady’s husband followed them49 – but of the truth or otherwise
of these stories, we express no opinion – returning from whatever
her occupation may have been, she made a point sometimes of
passing beneath the windows of a co ee house, where she could see
the wits without being seen, and thus could fancy from their
gestures what wise, witty, or spiteful things they were saying
without hearing a word of them; which was perhaps an advantage;
and once she stood half an hour watching three shadows on the
blind drinking tea together in a house in Bolt Court.
Never was any play so absorbing. She wanted to cry out, Bravo!
Bravo! For, to be sure, what a ne drama it was – what a page torn
from the thickest volume of human life! There was the little shadow
with the pouting lips, dgeting this way and that on his chair,
uneasy, petulant, o cious; there was the bent female shadow,
crooking a nger in the cup to feel how deep the tea was, for she
was blind; and there was the Roman-looking rolling shadow in the
big arm-chair – he who twisted his ngers so oddly and jerked his
head from side to side and swallowed down the tea in such vast
gulps. Dr. Johnson, Mr. Boswell, and Mrs. Williams – those were the
shadows’ names.50 So absorbed was she in the sight, that she forgot
to think how other ages would have envied her, though it seems
probable that on this occasion they would. She was content to gaze
and gaze. At length Mr. Boswell rose. He saluted the old woman
with tart asperity. But with what humility did he not abase himself
before the great Roman shadow, who now rose to its full height and
rocking somewhat as he stood there rolled out the most magni cent
phrases that ever left human lips; so Orlando thought them, though
she never heard a word that any of the three shadows said as they
sat there drinking tea.
At length she came home one night after one of these saunter-ings
and mounted to her bedroom. She took o her laced coat and stood
there in shirt and breeches looking out of the window. There was
something stirring in the air which forbade her to go to bed. A white
haze lay over the town, for it was a frosty night in midwinter and a
magni cent vista lay all round her. She could see St. Paul’s, the
Tower, Westminster Abbey, with all the spires and domes of the city
churches, the smooth bulk of its banks, the opulent and ample
curves of its halls and meeting-places. On the north rose the smooth,
shorn heights of Hampstead, and in the west the streets and squares
of Mayfair shone out in one clear radiance. Upon this serene and
orderly prospect the stars looked down, glittering, positive, hard,
from a cloudless sky. In the extreme clearness of the atmosphere the
line of every roof, the cowl of every chimney was perceptible; even
the cobbles in the streets showed distinct one from another, and
Orlando could not help comparing this orderly scene with the
irregular and huddled purlieus which had been the city of London in
the reign of Queen Elizabeth. Then, she remembered, the city, if
such one could call it, lay crowded, a mere huddle and
conglomeration of houses, under her windows at Blackfriars. The
stars re ected themselves in deep pits of stagnant water which lay
in the middle of the streets. A black shadow at the corner where the
wine shop used to stand was, as likely as not, the corpse of a
murdered man. She could remember the cries of many a one
wounded in such night brawlings, when she was a little boy, held to
the diamond-paned window in her nurse’s arms. Troops of ru ans,
men and women, unspeakably interlaced, lurched down the streets,
trolling out wild songs with jewels ashing in their ears, and knives
gleaming in their sts. On such a night as this the impermeable
tangle of the forests on Highgate and Hampstead would be outlined,
writhing in contorted intricacy against the sky. Here and there, on
one of the hills which rose above London, was a stark gallows tree,
with a corpse nailed to rot or parch on its cross; for danger and
insecurity, lust and violence, poetry and lth swarmed over the
tortuous Elizabethan highways and buzzed and stank – Orlando
could remember even now the smell of them on a hot night – in the
little rooms and narrow pathways of the city. Now – she leant out of
her window – all was light, order, and serenity.51 There was the
faint rattle of a coach on the cobbles. She heard the far-away cry of
the night watchman – ‘Just twelve o’clock on a frosty morning’. No
sooner had the words left his lips than the rst stroke of midnight
sounded. Orlando then for the rst time noticed a small cloud
gathered behind the dome of St. Paul’s. As the strokes sounded, the
cloud increased, and she saw it darken and spread with
extraordinary speed. At the same time a light breeze rose and by the
time the sixth stroke of midnight had struck the whole of the eastern
sky was covered with an irregular moving darkness, though the sky
to the west and north stayed clear as ever. Then the cloud spread
north. Height upon height above the city was engulfed by it. Only
Mayfair, with all its lights shining, burnt more brilliantly than ever
by contrast. With the eighth stroke, some hurrying tatters of cloud
sprawled over Piccadilly. They seemed to mass themselves and to
advance with extraordinary rapidity towards the west end. As the
ninth, tenth, and eleventh strokes struck, a huge blackness sprawled
over the whole of London. With the twelfth stroke of midnight, the
darkness was complete. A turbulent welter of cloud covered the city.
All was darkness; all was doubt; all was confusion. The Eighteenth
century was over; the Nineteenth century had begun.
 Chapter V

The great cloud which hung, not only over London, but over the
whole of the British Isles on the rst day of the nineteenth century
stayed, or rather, did not stay, for it was bu eted about constantly
by blustering gales, long enough to have extraordinary
consequences upon those who lived beneath its shadow. A change
seemed to have come over the climate of England. Rain fell
frequently, but only in tful gusts, which were no sooner over than
they began again. The sun shone, of course, but it was so girt about
with clouds and the air was so saturated with water, that its beams
were discoloured and purples, oranges, and reds of a dull sort took
the place of the more positive landscapes of the eighteenth century.
Under this bruised and sullen canopy the green of the cabbages was
less intense, and the white of the snow was muddied. But what was
worse, damp now began to make its way into every house – damp,
which is the most insidious of all enemies, for while the sun can be
shut out by blinds, and the frost roasted by a hot re, damp steals in
while we sleep; damp is silent, imperceptible, ubiquitous. Damp
swells the wood, furs the kettle, rusts the iron, rots the stone. So
gradual is the process, that it is not until we pick up some chest of
drawers, or coal scuttle, and the whole thing drops to pieces in our
hands, that we suspect even that the disease is at work.
Thus, stealthily and imperceptibly, none marking the exact day or
hour of the change, the constitution of England was altered1 and
nobody knew it. Everywhere the e ects were felt. The hardy
country gentleman, who had sat down gladly to a meal of ale and
beef in a room designed, perhaps by the brothers Adam,2 with
classic dignity, now felt chilly. Rugs appeared; beards were grown;
trousers were fastened tight under the instep. The chill which he felt
in his legs the country gentleman soon transferred to his house;
furniture was mu ed; walls and tables were covered; nothing was
left bare. Then a change of diet became essential. The mu n was
invented and the crumpet.3 Co ee supplanted the after-dinner port,
and, as co ee led to a drawing-room in which to drink it, and a
drawing-room to glass cases, and glass cases to arti cial owers,
and arti cial owers to mantelpieces, and mantelpieces to
pianofortes, and pianofortes to drawing-room ballads, and drawing-
room ballads (skipping a stage or two) to innumerable little dogs,
mats, and china ornaments, the home – which had become
extremely important – was completely altered.
Outside the house – it was another e ect of the damp – ivy grew
in unparalleled profusion. Houses that had been of bare stone were
smothered in greenery. No garden, however formal its original
design, lacked a shrubbery, a wilderness, a maze. What light
penetrated to the bedrooms where children were born was naturally
of an obfusc green,4 and what light penetrated to the drawing-rooms
where grown men and women lived came through curtains of brown
and purple plush. But the change did not stop at outward things.
The damp struck within. Men felt the chill in their hearts; the damp
in their minds. In a desperate e ort to snuggle their feelings into
some sort of warmth one subterfuge was tried after another. Love,
birth, and death were all swaddled in a variety of ne phrases. The
sexes drew further and further apart. No open conversation was
tolerated. Evasions and concealments were sedulously practised on
both sides. And just as the ivy and the evergreen rioted in the damp
earth outside, so did the same fertility show itself within. The life of
the average woman was a succession of childbirths. She married at
nineteen and had fteen or eighteen children by the time she was
thirty; for twins abounded. Thus the British Empire came into
existence;5 and thus – for there is no stopping damp; it gets into the
inkpot as it gets into the woodwork – sentences swelled, adjectives
multiplied, lyrics became epics, and little tri es that had been essays
a column long were now encyclopaedias in ten or twenty volumes.
But Eusebius Chubb shall be our witness to the e ect this all had
upon the mind of a sensitive man who could do nothing to stop it.
There is a passage towards the end of his memoirs where he
describes how, after writing thirty- ve folio pages one morning ‘all
about nothing’ he screwed the lid on his inkpot and went for a turn
in his garden. Soon he found himself involved in the shrubbery.
Innumerable leaves creaked and glistened above his head. He
seemed to himself ‘to crush the mould of a million more under his
feet’. Thick smoke exuded from a damp bon re at the end of the
garden. He re ected that no re on earth could ever hope to
consume that vast vegetable encumbrance. Wherever he looked,
vegetation was rampant. Cucumbers ‘came scrolloping6 across the
grass to his feet’. Giant cauli owers towered deck above deck till
they rivalled, to his disordered imagination, the elm trees
themselves. Hens laid incessantly eggs of no special tint. Then,
remembering with a sigh his own fecundity and his poor wife Jane,
now in the throes of her fteenth con nement indoors, how, he
asked himself, could he blame the fowls? He looked upwards into
the sky. Did not heaven itself, or that great frontispiece of heaven,
which is the sky, indicate the assent, indeed, the instigation of the
heavenly hierarchy? For there, winter or summer, year in year out,
the clouds turned and tumbled, like whales, he pondered, or
elephants rather; but no, there was no escaping the simile which
was pressed upon him from a thousand airy acres; the whole sky
itself as it spread wide above the British Isles was nothing but a vast
feather bed; and the undistinguished fecundity of the garden, the
bedroom and the henroost was copied there. He went indoors, wrote
the passage quoted above, laid his head in a gas oven, and when
they found him later he was past revival.
While this went on in every part of England, it was all very well
for Orlando to mew herself in her house at Blackfriars and pretend
that the climate was the same; that one could still say what one
liked and wear knee-breeches or skirts as the fancy took one. Even
she, at length, was forced to acknowledge that times were changed.
One afternoon in the early part of the century she was driving
through St. James’s Park in her old panelled coach when one of
those sunbeams, which occasionally, though not often, managed to
come to earth, struggled through, marbling the clouds with strange
prismatic colours as it passed. Such a sight was su ciently strange
after the clear and uniform skies of the eighteenth century to cause
her to pull the window down and look at it. The puce and amingo
clouds made her think with a pleasurable anguish, which proves
that she was insensibly a icted with the damp already, of dolphins
dying in Ionian seas. But what was her surprise when, as it struck
the earth, the sunbeam seemed to call forth, or to light up, a
pyramid, hecatomb, or trophy7 (for it had something of a banquet-
table air) – a conglomeration at any rate of the most heterogeneous
and ill-assorted objects, piled higgledy-piggledy in a vast mound
where the statue of Queen Victoria now stands! Draped about a vast
cross of fretted and oriated gold were widow’s weeds and bridal
veils; hooked on to other excrescences were crystal palaces,
bassinettes, military helmets, memorial wreaths, trousers, whiskers,
wedding cakes, cannon, Christmas trees, telescopes, extinct
monsters, globes, maps, elephants, and mathematical instruments –
the whole supported like a gigantic coat of arms on the right side by
a female gure clothed in owing white; on the left, by a portly
gentleman wearing a frock-coat and sponge-bag trousers. The
incongruity of the objects, the association of the fully clothed and
the partly draped, the garishness of the di erent colours and their
plaid-like juxtapositions a icted Orlando with the most profound
dismay. She had never, in all her life, seen anything at once so
indecent, so hideous, and so monumental. It might, and indeed it
must be, the e ect of the sun on the water-logged air; it would
vanish with the rst breeze that blew; but for all that, it looked, as
she drove past, as if it were destined to endure for ever. Nothing,
she felt, sinking back into the corner of her coach, no wind, rain,
sun, or thunder, could ever demolish that garish erection. Only the
noses would mottle and the trumpets would rust; but there they
would remain, pointing east, west, south, and north, eternally. She
looked back as her coach swept up Constitution Hill. Yes, there it
was, still beaming placidly in a light which – she pulled her watch
out of her fob – was, of course, the light of twelve o’clock mid-day.
None other could be so prosaic, so matter-of-fact, so impervious to
any hint of dawn or sunset, so seemingly calculated to last for ever.
She was determined not to look again. Already she felt the tides of
her blood run sluggishly. But what was more peculiar, a blush, vivid
and singular, overspread her cheeks as she passed Buckingham
Palace and her eyes seemed forced by a superior power down upon
her knees. Suddenly she saw with a start that she was wearing black
breeches. She never ceased blushing till she had reached her country
house, which, considering the time it takes four horses to trot thirty
miles, will be taken, we hope, as a signal proof of her chastity.
Once there, she followed what had now become the most
imperious need of her nature and wrapped herself as well as she
could in a damask quilt which she snatched from her bed. She
explained to the Widow Bartholomew (who had succeeded good old
Grimsditch as housekeeper) that she felt chilly.
‘So do we all, m’lady,’ said the Widow, heaving a profound sigh.
‘The walls is sweating,’ she said, with a curious, lugubrious
complacency, and sure enough, she had only to lay her hand on the
oak panels for the nger prints to be marked there. The ivy had
grown so profusely that many windows were now sealed up. The
kitchen was so dark that they could scarcely tell a kettle from a
cullender. A poor black cat had been mistaken for coals and
shovelled on the re. Most of the maids were already wearing three
or four red- annel petticoats, though the month was August.
‘But is it true, m’lady,’ the good woman asked, hugging herself,
while the golden cruci x heaved on her bosom, ‘that the Queen,
bless her, is wearing a what d’you call it, a —’ the good woman
hesitated and blushed.
‘A crinoline’8 Orlando helped her out with it (for the word had
reached Blackfriars). Mrs. Bartholomew nodded. The tears were
already running down her cheeks, but as she wept she smiled. For it
was pleasant to weep. Were they not all of them weak women?
wearing crinolines the better to conceal the fact; the great fact; the
only fact; but, nevertheless, the deplorable fact; which every modest
woman did her best to deny until denial was impossible; the fact
that she was about to bear a child? to bear fteen or twenty
children indeed, so that most of a modest woman’s life was spent,
after all, in denying what, on one day at least of every year, was
made obvious.
‘The mu ns is keepin’ ’ot’, said Mrs. Bartholomew, mopping up
her tears, ‘in the liberry.’
And wrapped in a damask bed quilt, to a dish of mu ns Orlando
now sat down.
‘The mu ns is keepin’ ’ot in the liberry’ – Orlando minced out the
horrid cockney phrase in Mrs. Bartholomew’s re ned cockney
accents as she drank – but no, she detested the mild uid – her tea.
It was in this very room, she remembered, that Queen Elizabeth had
stood astride the replace with a agon of beer in her hand, which
she suddenly dashed on the table when Lord Burghley tactlessly
used the imperative instead of the subjunctive. ‘Little man, little
man’ – Orlando could hear her say – ‘is “must” a word to be
addressed to princes?’9 And down came the agon on the table:
there was the mark of it still.
But when Orlando leapt to her feet, as the mere thought of that
great Queen commanded, the bed quilt tripped her up, and she fell
back in her arm-chair with a curse. To-morrow she would have to
buy twenty yards or more of black bombazine,10 she supposed, to
make a skirt. And then (here she blushed), she would have to buy a
crinoline, and then (here she blushed) a bassinette, and then
another crinoline, and so on … The blushes came and went with the
most exquisite iteration of modesty and shame imaginable. One
might see the spirit of the age blowing, now hot, now cold, upon her
cheeks. And if the spirit of the age blew a little unequally, the
crinoline being blushed for before the husband, her ambiguous
position must excuse her (even her sex was still in dispute) and the
irregular life she had lived before.
At length the colour on her cheeks resumed its stability and it
seemed as if the spirit of the age – if such indeed it were – lay
dormant for a time. Then Orlando felt in the bosom of her shirt as if
for some locket or relic of lost a ection, and drew out no such thing,
but a roll of paper, sea-stained, blood-stained, travel-stained – the
manuscript of her poem, ‘The Oak Tree’. She had carried this about
with her for so many years now, and in such hazardous
circumstances, that many of the pages were stained, some were
torn, while the straits she had been in for writing paper when with
the gipsies, had forced her to overscore the margins and cross the
lines till the manuscript looked like a piece of darning most
conscientiously carried out. She turned back to the rst page and
read the date, 1586, written in her own boyish hand. She had been
working at it for close on three hundred years now.11 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 orid;
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 re ected, 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 di erence …’
 No sooner had the thought taken shape, than, as if to rebuke it,
the door was ung wide and in marched Basket, the butler, followed
by Bartholomew, the housekeeper, to clear away tea. Orlando, who
had just dipped her pen in the ink, and was about to indite some
re ection upon the eternity of all things, was much annoyed to be
impeded by a blot, which spread and meandered round her pen. It
was some in rmity of the quill, she supposed; it was split or dirty.
She dipped it again. The blot increased. She tried to go on with
what she was saying; no words came. Next she began to decorate
the blot with wings and whiskers, till it became a round-headed
monster, something between a bat and a wombat. But as for writing
poetry with Basket and Bartholomew in the room, it was impossible.
No sooner had she said ‘Impossible’ than, to her astonishment and
alarm, the pen began to curve and caracole with the smoothest
possible uency. Her page was written in the neatest sloping Italian
hand with the most insipid verse she had ever read in her life:12

I am myself but a vile link

Amid life’s weary chain,

But I have spoken hallow’d words,

Oh, do not say in vain!

Will the young maiden, when her tears,

Alone in moonlight shine,

Tears for the absent and the loved,

Murmur—
 she wrote without a stop as Bartholomew and Basket grunted and
groaned about the room, mending the re, picking up the mu ns.
Again she dipped her pen and o it went –

She was so changed, the soft carnation cloud

Once mantling o’er her cheek like that which eve

Hangs o’er the sky, glowing with roseate hue,

Had faded into paleness, broken by

Bright burning blushes, torches of the tomb,

but here, by an abrupt movement she spilt the ink over the page
and blotted it from human sight she hoped for ever. She was all of a
quiver, all of a stew. Nothing more repulsive could be imagined
than to feel the ink owing thus in cascades of involuntary
inspiration. What had happened to her? Was it the damp, was it
Bartholomew, was it Basket, what was it? she demanded. But the
room was empty. No one answered her, unless the dripping of the
rain in the ivy could be taken for an answer.
Meanwhile, she became conscious, as she stood at the window, of
an extraordinary tingling and vibration all over her, as if she were
made of a thousand wires upon which some breeze or errant ngers
were playing scales. Now her toes tingled; now her marrow. She had
the queerest sensations about the thigh bones. Her hairs seemed to
erect themselves. Her arms sang and twanged as the telegraph wires
would be singing and twanging in twenty years or so. But all this
agitation seemed at length to concentrate in her hands; and then in
one hand, and then in one nger of that hand, and then nally to
contract itself so that it made a ring of quivering sensibility about
the second nger of the left hand. And when she raised it to see
what caused this agitation, she saw nothing – nothing but the vast
solitary emerald which Queen Elizabeth had given her. And was
that not enough? she asked. It was of the nest water. It was worth
ten thousand pounds at least. The vibration seemed, in the oddest
way (but remember we are dealing with some of the darkest
manifestations of the human soul) to say No, that is not enough;
and, further, to assume a note of interrogation, as though it were
asking, what did it mean, this hiatus, this strange oversight? till
poor Orlando felt positively ashamed of the second nger of her left
hand without in the least knowing why. At this moment,
Bartholomew came in to ask which dress she should lay out for
dinner, and Orlando, whose senses were much quickened, instantly
glanced at Bartholomew’s left hand, and instantly perceived what
she had never noticed before – a thick ring of rather jaundiced
yellow circling the third nger where her own was bare.
‘Let me look at your ring, Bartholomew,’ she said, stretching her
hand to take it.
At this, Bartholomew made as if she had been struck in the breast
by a rogue. She started back a pace or two, clenched her hand and
ung it away from her with a gesture that was noble in the extreme.
‘No,’ she said, with resolute dignity, her Ladyship might look if she
pleased, but as for taking o her wedding ring, not the Archbishop
nor the Pope nor Queen Victoria on her throne could force her to do
that. Her Thomas had put it on her nger twenty- ve years, six
months, three weeks ago; she had slept in it; worked in it; washed in
it; prayed in it; and proposed to be buried in it. In fact, Orlando
understood her to say, but her voice was much broken with
emotion, that it was by the gleam on her wedding ring that she
would be assigned her station among the angels and its lustre would
be tarnished for ever if she let it out of her keeping for a second.
‘Heaven help us,’ said Orlando, standing at the window and
watching the pigeons at their pranks, ‘what a world we live in!
What a world to be sure!’ Its complexities amazed her. It now
seemed to her that the whole world was ringed with gold. She went
in to dinner. Wedding rings abounded. She went to church. Wedding
rings were everywhere. She drove out. Gold, or pinchbeck,13 thin,
thick, plain, smooth, they glowed dully on every hand. Rings lled
the jewellers’ shops, not the ashing pastes and diamonds of
Orlando’s recollection, but simple bands without a stone in them. At
the same time, she began to notice a new habit among the town
people. In the old days, one would meet a boy tri ing with a girl
under a hawthorn hedge frequently enough. Orlando had icked
many a couple with the tip of her whip and laughed and passed on.
Now, all that was changed. Couples trudged and plodded in the
middle of the road indissolubly linked together.14 The woman’s
right hand was invariably passed through the man’s left and her
ngers were rmly gripped by his. Often it was not till the horses’
noses were on them that they budged, and then, though they moved
it was all in one piece, heavily, to the side of the road. Orlando
could only suppose that some new discovery had been made about
the race; that they were somehow stuck together, couple after
couple, but who had made it, and when, she could not guess. It did
not seem to be Nature. She looked at the doves and the rabbits and
the elk-hounds and she could not see that Nature had changed her
ways or mended them, since the time of Elizabeth at least. There
was no indissoluble alliance among the brutes that she could see.
Could it be Queen Victoria then, or Lord Melbourne?15 Was it from
them that the great discovery of marriage proceeded? Yet the
Queen, she pondered, was said to be fond of dogs, and Lord
Melbourne, she had heard, was said to be fond of women. It was
strange – it was distasteful; indeed, there was something in this
indissolubility of bodies which was repugnant to her sense of
decency and sanitation. Her ruminations, however, were
accompanied by such a tingling and twangling of the a icted nger
that she could scarcely keep her ideas in order. They were
languishing and ogling like a housemaid’s fancies. They made her
blush. There was nothing for it but to buy one of those ugly bands
and wear it like the rest. This she did, slipping it, overcome with
shame, upon her nger in the shadow of a curtain; but without
avail. The tingling persisted more violently, more indignantly than
ever. She did not sleep a wink that night. Next morning when she
took up the pen to write, either she could think of nothing, and the
pen make one large lachrymose blot after another, or it ambled o ,
more alarmingly still, into melli uous uencies16 about early death
and corruption, which were worse than no thinking at all. For it
would seem – her case proved it — that we write, not with the
ngers, but with the whole person. The nerve which controls the
pen winds itself about every bre of our being, threads the heart,
pierces the liver. Though the seat of her trouble seemed to be the
left hand, she could feel herself poisoned through and through, and
was forced at length to consider the most desperate of remedies,
which was to yield completely and submissively to the spirit of the
age, and take a husband.
That this was much against her natural temperament has been
su ciently made plain. When the sound of the Archduke’s chariot
wheels died away, the cry that rose to her lips was ‘Life! A Lover!’
not ‘Life! A Husband!’ and it was in pursuit of this aim that she had
gone to town and run about the world as has been shown in the
previous chapter. Such is the indomitable nature of the spirit of the
age, however, that it batters down anyone who tries to make stand
against it far more e ectually than those who bend its own way.
Orlando had inclined herself naturally to the Elizabethan spirit, to
the Restoration spirit, to the spirit of the eighteenth century, and
had in consequence scarcely been aware of the change from one age
to the other. But the spirit of the nineteenth century was
antipathetic to her in the extreme, and thus it took her and broke
her, and she was aware of her defeat at its hands as she had never
been before. For it is probable that the human spirit has its place in
time assigned to it; some are born of this age, some of that; and now
that Orlando was grown a woman, a year or two past thirty indeed,
the lines of her character were xed, and to bend them the wrong
way was intolerable.
So she stood mournfully at the drawing-room window
(Bartholomew had so christened the library) dragged down by the
weight of the crinoline which she had submissively adopted. It was
heavier and more drab than any dress she had yet worn. None had
ever so impeded her movements. No longer could she stride through
the garden with her dogs, or run lightly to the high mound and ing
herself beneath the oak tree. Her skirts collected damp leaves and
straw. The plumed hat tossed on the breeze. The thin shoes were
quickly soaked and mud-caked. Her muscles had lost their pliancy.
She became nervous lest there should be robbers behind the
wainscot and afraid, for the rst time in her life, of ghosts in the
corridors. All these things inclined her, step by step, to submit to the
new discovery, whether Queen Victoria’s or another’s, that each
man and each woman has another allotted to it for life, whom it
supports, by whom it is supported, till death them do part. It would
be a comfort, she felt, to lean; to sit down; yes, to lie down; never,
never, never to get up again. Thus did the spirit work upon her, for
all her past pride, and as she came sloping down the scale of
emotion to this lowly and unaccustomed lodging-place, those
twanglings and tinglings which had been so captious and so
interrogative modulated into the sweetest melodies, till it seemed as
if angels were plucking harp-strings with white ngers and her
whole being was pervaded by a seraphic harmony.
 But whom could she lean upon? She asked that question of the
wild autumn winds. For it was now October, and wet as usual. Not
the Archduke; he had married a very great lady and had hunted
hares in Roumania these many years now; nor Mr. M.; he was
become a Catholic; nor the Marquis of C.; he made sacks in Botany
Bay;17 nor the Lord O.; he had long been food for shes. One way or
another, all her old cronies were gone now, and the Nells and the
Kits of Drury Lane, much though she favoured them, scarcely did to
lean upon.
‘Whom’, she asked, casting her eyes upon the revolving clouds,
clasping her hands as she knelt on the window-sill, and looking the
very image of appealing womanhood as she did so, ‘can I lean
upon?’ Her words formed themselves, her hands clasped themselves,
involuntarily, just as her pen had written of its own accord. It was
not Orlando who spoke, but the spirit of the age. But whichever it
was, nobody answered it. The rooks were tumbling pell-mell among
the violet clouds of autumn. The rain had stopped at last and there
was an iridescence in the sky which tempted her to put on her
plumed hat and her little stringed shoes and stroll out before dinner.
‘Everyone is mated except myself,’ she mused, as she trailed
disconsolately across the courtyard. There were the rooks; Canute
and Pippin18 even – transitory as their alliances were, still each this
evening seemed to have a partner. ‘Whereas, I, who am mistress of
it all,’ Orlando thought, glancing as she passed at the innumerable
emblazoned windows of the hall, ‘am single, am mateless, am
alone.’
 Such thoughts had never entered her head before. Now they bore
her down unescapably. Instead of thrusting the gate open, she
tapped with a gloved hand for the porter to unfasten it for her. One
must lean on someone, she thought, if it is only on a porter; and half
wished to stay behind and help him to grill his chop on a bucket of
ery coals, but was too timid to ask it. So she strayed out into the
park alone, faltering at rst and apprehensive lest there might be
poachers or gamekeepers or even errand-boys to marvel that a great
lady should walk alone.
At every step she glanced nervously lest some male form should be
hiding behind a furze bush or some savage cow be lowering its
horns to toss her. But there were only the rooks aunting in the sky.
A steel-blue plume from one of them fell among the heather. She
loved wild birds’ feathers. She had used to collect them as a boy.
She picked it up and stuck it in her hat. The air blew upon her spirit
somewhat and revived it. As the rooks went whirling and wheeling
above her head and feather after feather fell gleaming through the
purplish air, she followed them, her long cloak oating behind her,
over the moor, up the hill. She had not walked so far for years. Six
feathers19 had she picked from the grass and drawn between her
nger tips and pressed to her lips to feel their smooth, glinting
plumage, when she saw, gleaming on the hill-side, a silver pool,
mysterious as the lake into which Sir Bedivere ung the sword of
Arthur.20 A single feather quivered in the air and fell into the
middle of it. Then, some strange ecstasy came over her. Some wild
notion she had of following the birds to the rim of the world and
 inging herself on the spongy turf and there drinking forgetfulness,
while the rooks’ hoarse laughter sounded over her. She quickened
her pace; she ran; she tripped; the tough heather roots ung her to
the ground. Her ankle was broken. She could not rise. But there she
lay content. The scent of the bog myrtle and the meadow-sweet was
in her nostrils. The rooks’ hoarse laughter was in her ears. ‘I have
found my mate,’ she murmured. ‘It is the moor. I am nature’s bride,’
she whispered, giving herself in rapture to the cold embraces of the
grass as she lay folded in her cloak in the hollow by the pool. ‘Here
will I lie. (A feather fell upon her brow.) I have found a greener
laurel than the bay. My forehead will be cool always. There are wild
birds’ feathers – the owl’s, the nightjar’s. I shall dream wild dreams.
My hands shall wear no wedding ring,’ she continued, slipping it
from her nger. ‘The roots shall twine about them. Ah!’ she sighed,
pressing her head luxuriously on its spongy pillow, ‘I have sought
happiness through many ages and not found it; fame and missed it;
love and not known it; life – and behold, death is better. I have
known many men and many women,’ she continued; ‘none
Orlando on Her Return To England
have I understood. It is better that I should lie at peace here with
only the sky above me – as the gipsy told me years ago. That was in
Turkey.’ And she looked straight up into the marvellous golden
foam into which the clouds had churned themselves, and saw next
moment a track in it, and camels passing in single le through the
rocky desert among clouds of red dust; and then, when the camels
had passed, there were only mountains, very high and full of clefts
and with pinnacles of rock, and she fancied she heard goat bells
ringing in their passes, and in their folds were elds of irises and
gentian. So the sky changed and her eyes slowly lowered themselves
down and down till they came to the rain-darkened earth and saw
the great hump of the South Downs, owing in one wave along the
coast; and where the land parted, there was the sea, the sea with
ships passing; and she fancied she heard a gun far out at sea, and
thought at rst, ‘That’s the Armada’, and then thought ‘No, it’s
Nelson’,21 and then remembered how those wars were over and the
ships were busy merchant ships; and the sails on the winding river
were those of pleasure boats. She saw, too, cattle sprinkled on the
dark elds, sheep and cows, and she saw the lights coming here and
there in farm-house windows, and lanterns moving among the cattle
as the shepherd went his rounds and the cowman; and then the
lights went out and the stars rose and tangled themselves about the
sky. Indeed, she was falling asleep with the wet feathers on her face
and her ear pressed to the ground when she heard, deep within,
some hammer on an anvil, or was it a heart beating? Tick-tock, tick-
tock, so it hammered, so it beat, the anvil, or the heart in the middle
of the earth; until, as she listened, she thought it changed to the trot
of a horse’s hoofs; one, two, three, four, she counted; then she heard
a stumble; then, as it came nearer and nearer, she could hear the
crack of a twig and the suck of the wet bog in its hoofs. The horse
was almost on her. She sat upright. Towering dark against the
yellow-slashed sky of dawn, with the plovers rising and falling about
him, she saw a man on horseback.22 He started. The horse stopped.
‘Madam,’ the man cried, leaping to the ground, ‘you’re hurt!’ ‘I’m
dead, sir!’ she replied.

A few minutes later, they became engaged.

The morning after, as they sat at breakfast, he told her his name. It
was Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine, Esquire.23
‘I knew it!’ she said, for there was something romantic and
chivalrous, passionate, melancholy, yet determined about him
which went with the wild, dark-plumed name – a name which had,
in her mind, the steel-blue gleam of rooks’ wings, the hoarse
laughter of their caws, the snake-like twisting descent of their
feathers in a silver pool, and a thousand other things which will be
described presently.
‘Mine is Orlando,’ she said. He had guessed it. For if you see a ship
in full sail coming with the sun on it proudly sweeping across the
Mediterranean from the South Seas, one says at once, ‘Orlando’, he
explained.
In fact, though their acquaintance had been so short, they had
guessed, as always happens between lovers, everything of any
importance about each other in two seconds at the utmost, and it
now remained only to ll in such unimportant details as what they
were called; where they lived; and whether they were beggars or
people of substance. He had a castle in the Hebrides, but it was
ruined, he told her. Gannets feasted in the banqueting-hall. He had
been a soldier and a sailor, and had explored the East. He was on his
way now to join his brig24 at Falmouth, but the wind had fallen and
it was only when the gale blew from the South-west that he could
put out to sea. Orlando looked hastily from the breakfast-room
window at the gilt leopard on the weather vane. Mercifully its tail
pointed due east and was steady as a rock. ‘Oh! Shel, don’t leave
me!’ she cried. ‘I’m passionately in love with you,’ she said. No
sooner had the words left her mouth than an awful suspicion rushed
into both their minds simultaneously,
‘You’re a woman, Shel!’ she cried.
‘You’re a man, Orlando!’ he cried.
Never was there such a scene of protestation and demonstration as
then took place since the world began. When it was over and they
were seated again she asked him, what was this talk of a South-west
gale? Where was he bound for?
‘For the Horn,’ he said brie y, and blushed. (For a man had to
blush as a woman had, only at rather di erent things.) It was only
by dint of great pressure on her side and the use of much intuition
that she gathered that his life was spent in the most desperate and
splendid of adventures – which is to voyage round Cape Horn in the
teeth of a gale. Masts had been snapped o ; sails torn to ribbons
(she had to drag the admission from him). Sometimes the ship had
sunk, and he had been left the only survivor on a raft with a biscuit.
‘It’s about all a fellow can do nowadays’ he said sheepishly, and
helped himself to great spoonfuls of strawberry jam. The vision
which she had thereupon of this boy (for he was little more) sucking
peppermints, for which he had a passion, while the masts snapped
and the stars reeled and he roared brief orders to cut this adrift, to
heave that overboard, brought the tears to her eyes, tears, she
noted, of a ner avour than any she had cried before. ‘I am a
woman’ she thought, ‘a real woman, at last.’ She thanked Bonthrop
from the bottom of her heart for having given her this rare and
unexpected delight. Had she not been lame in the left foot, she
would have sat upon his knee.
‘Shel, my darling’ she began again, ‘tell me …’ and so they talked
two hours or more, perhaps about Cape Horn, perhaps not, and
really it would pro t little to write down what they said, for they
knew each other so well that they could say anything, which is
tantamount to saying nothing, or saying such stupid, prosy things as
how to cook an omelette, or where to buy the best boots in London,
things which have no lustre taken from their setting, yet are
positively of amazing beauty within it. For it has come about, by the
wise economy of nature, that our modern spirit can almost dispense
with language; the commonest expressions do, since no expressions
do; hence the most ordinary conversation is often the most poetic,
and the most poetic is precisely that which cannot be written down.
For which reasons we leave a great blank here, which must be taken
to indicate that the space is lled to repletion.

After some days more of this kind of talk,

‘Orlando, my dearest,’ Shel was beginning, when there was a
scu ing outside, and Basket the butler entered with the information
that there was a couple of Peelers25 downstairs with a warrant from
the Queen.
‘Show ’em up,’ said Shelmerdine brie y, as if on his own quarter-
deck, taking up, by instinct, a stand with his hands behind him in
front of the replace. Two o cers in bottle-green uniforms with
truncheons at their hips then entered the room and stood at
attention. Formalities being over, they gave into Orlando’s own
hands, as their commission was, a legal document of some very
impressive sort, judging by the blobs of sealing wax, the ribbons, the
oaths, and the signatures, which were all of the highest importance.
Orlando ran her eyes through it and then, using the rst nger of
her right hand as pointer, read out the following facts as being most
germane to the matter.
‘The lawsuits are settled’ she read out… ‘some in my favour, as for
example … others not. Turkish marriage annulled (I was
ambassador in Constantinople, Shel,’ she explained). ‘Children
pronounced illegitimate (they said I had three sons by Pepita, a
Spanish dancer). So they don’t inherit, which is all to the good …
Sex? Ah! what about sex? My sex’, she read out with some
solemnity, ‘is pronounced indisputably, and beyond the shadow of a
doubt (what was I telling you a moment ago, Shel?), female. The
estates which are now desequestrated in perpetuity descend and are
tailed and entailed upon the heirs male of my body, or in default of
marriage’ – but here she grew impatient with this legal verbiage,
and said, ‘but there won’t be any default of marriage, nor of heirs
either, so the rest can be taken as read.’ Whereupon she appended
her own signature beneath Lord Palmerston’s26 and entered from
that moment into the undisturbed possession of her titles, her house,
and her estate – which was now so much shrunk, for the cost of the
lawsuits had been prodigious, that, though she was in nitely noble
again, she was also excessively poor.
When the result of the lawsuit was made known (and rumour ew
much quicker than the telegraph which has supplanted it), the
whole town was lled with rejoicings.27
[Horses were put into carriages for the sole purpose of being taken
out. Empty barouches and landaus were trundled up and down the
High Street incessantly. Addresses were read from the Bull. Replies
were made from the Stag. The town was illuminated. Gold caskets
were securely sealed in glass cases. Coins were well and duly laid
under stones. Hospitals were founded. Rat and Sparrow clubs were
inaugurated. Turkish women by the do2en were burnt in e gy in
the market-place, together with scores of peasant boys with the
label ‘I am a base Pretender’, lolling from their mouths. The Queen’s
cream-coloured ponies were soon seen trotting up the avenue with a
command to Orlando to dine and sleep at the Castle, that very same
night. Her table, as on a previous occasion, was snowed under with
invitations from the Countess of R., Lady Q., Lady Palmerston, the
Marchioness of P., Mrs. W. E. Gladstone,28 and others, beseeching
the pleasure of her company, reminding her of ancient alliances
between their family and her own, etc.] – all of which is properly
enclosed in square brackets, as above, for the good reason that a
parenthesis it was without any importance in Orlando’s life.29 She
skipped it, to get on with the text. For when the bon res were
blazing in the market-place, she was in the dark woods with
Shelmerdine alone. So ne was the weather that the trees stretched
their branches motionless above them, and if a leaf fell, it fell,
spotted red and gold, so slowly that one could watch it for half an
hour uttering and falling till it came to rest at last, on Orlando’s
foot.
‘Tell me, Mar,’ she would say (and here it must be explained, that
when she called him by the rst syllable of his rst name, she was
in a dreamy, amorous, acquiescent mood, domestic, languid a little,
as if spiced logs were burning, and it was evening, yet not time to
dress, and a thought wet perhaps outside, enough to make the
leaves glisten, but a nightingale might be singing even so among the
azaleas, two or three dogs barking at distant farms, a cock crowing –
all of which the reader should imagine in her voice) – ‘Tell me, Mar’
she would say, ‘about Cape Horn.’ Then Shelmerdine would make a
little model on the ground of the Cape with twigs and dead leaves
and an empty snail shell or two.
 ‘Here’s the north,’ he would say. ‘There’s the south. The wind’s
coming from hereabouts. Now the brig is sailing due west; we’ve
just lowered the top-boom mizzen; and so you see –here, where this
bit of grass is, she enters the current which you’ll nd marked –
where’s my map and compasses, Bo’sun? –Ah! thanks, that’ll do,
where the snail shell is. The current catches her on the starboard
side, so we must rig the jib-boom or we shall be carried to the
larboard,30 which is where that beech leaf is – for you must
understand my dear –’ and so he would go on, and she would listen
to every word; interpreting them rightly, so as to see, that is to say,
without his having to tell her, the phosphorescence on the waves;
the icicles clanking in the shrouds; how he went to the top of the
mast in a gale; there re ected on the destiny of man; came down
again; had a whisky and soda; went on shore; was trapped by a
black woman; repented; reasoned it out; read Pascal;31 determined
to write philosophy; bought a monkey; debated the true end of life;
decided in favour of Cape Horn, and so on. All this and a thousand
other things she understood him to say, and so when she replied,
Yes, negresses are seductive, aren’t they? he having told her that the
supply of biscuits now gave out, he was surprised and delighted to
nd how well she had taken his meaning.
‘Are you positive you aren’t a man?’ he would ask anxiously, and
she would echo,
‘Can it be possible you’re not a woman?’ and then they must put it
to the proof without more ado. For each was so surprised at the
quickness of the other’s sympathy, and it was to each such a
revelation that a woman could be as tolerant and free-spoken as a
man, and a man as strange and subtle as a woman, that they had to
put the matter to the proof at once.
And so they would go on talking or rather, understanding, which
has become the main art of speech in an age when words are
growing daily so scanty in comparison with ideas that ‘the biscuits
ran out’ has to stand for kissing a negress in the dark when one has
just read Bishop Berkeley’s32 philosophy for the tenth time. (And
from this it follows that only the most profound masters of style can
tell the truth, and when one meets a simple one-syllabled writer,
one may conclude, without any doubt at all, that the poor man is
lying.)
So they would talk; and then, when her feet were fairly covered
with spotted autumn leaves, Orlando would rise and stroll away into
the heart of the woods in solitude, leaving Bonthrop sitting there
among the snail shells, making models of Cape Horn. ‘Bonthrop,’ she
would say, ‘I’m o ,’ and when she called him by his second name,
‘Bonthrop’, it should signify to the reader that she was in a solitary
mood, felt them both as specks on a desert, was desirous only of
meeting death by herself, for people die daily, die at dinner-tables,
or like this, out of doors in the autumn woods; and with the bon res
blazing and Lady Palmerston or Lady Derby33 asking her out every
night to dinner, the desire for death would overcome her, and so
saying ‘Bonthrop’, she said in e ect, ‘I’m dead’, and pushed her way
as a spirit might through the spectre-pale beech trees, and so oared
herself deep into solitude as if the little icker of noise and
movement were over and she were free now to take her way – all of
which the reader should hear in her voice when she said ‘Bonthrop’;
and should also add, the better to illumine the word, that for him
too the same word signi ed, mystically, separation and isolation
and the disembodied pacing the deck of his brig in unfathomable
seas.
After some hours of death, suddenly a jay shrieked ‘Shelmerdine’,
and stooping, she picked one of those autumn crocuses which to
some people signify that very word, and put it with the jay’s feather
that came tumbling blue through the beech woods, in her breast.
Then she called ‘Shelmerdine’ and the word went shooting this way
and that way through the woods and struck him where he sat,
making models out of snail shells in the grass. He saw her, and
heard her coming to him with the crocus and the jay’s feather in her
breast, and cried ‘Orlando’, which meant (and it must be
remembered that when bright colours like blue and yellow mix
themselves in our eyes, some of it rubs o on our thoughts) rst the
bowing and swaying of bracken as if something were breaking
through; which proved to be a ship in full sail, heaving and tossing a
little dreamily, rather as if she had a whole year of summer days to
make her voyage in; and so the ship bears down, heaving this way,
heaving that way, nobly, indolently, and rides over the crest of this
wave and sinks into the hollow of that one, and so, suddenly stands
over you (who are in a little cockle shell of a boat, looking up at
her) with all her sails quivering,34 and then, behold, they drop all of
a heap on deck – as Orlando dropped now into the grass beside him.
 Eight or nine days had been spent thus, but on the tenth, which
was the 26th of October, Orlando was lying in the bracken, while
Shelmerdine recited Shelley (whose entire works he had by heart),
when a leaf which had started to fall slowly enough from a tree-top
whipped briskly across Orlando’s foot. A second leaf followed and
then a third. Orlando shivered and turned pale. It was the wind.
Shelmerdine – but it would be more proper now to call him
Bonthrop – leapt to his feet.
‘The wind!’ he cried.
Together they ran through the woods, the wind plastering them
with leaves as they ran, to the great court and through it and the
little courts, frightened servants leaving their brooms and their
saucepans to follow after till they reached the Chapel,35 and there a
scattering of lights was lit as fast as could be, one knocking over this
bench, another snu ng out that taper. Bells were rung. People were
summoned. At length there was Mr. Dupper catching at the ends of
his white tie and asking where was the prayer book. And they thrust
Queen Mary’s prayer book in his hands and he searched hastily
uttering the pages, and said, ‘Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine,
and Lady Orlando, kneel down’; and they knelt down, and now they
were bright and now they were dark as the light and shadow came
ying helter-skelter through the painted windows; and among the
banging of innumerable doors and a sound like brass pots beating,
the organ sounded, its growl coming loud and faint alternately, and
Mr. Dupper, who was grown a very old man, tried now to raise his
voice above the uproar and could not be heard and then all was
quiet for a moment, and one word – it might be ‘the jaws of death’ –
rang out clear, while all the estate servants kept pressing in with
rakes and whips still in their hands to listen, and some sang aloud
and others prayed, and now a bird was dashed against the pane, and
now there was a clap of thunder, so that no one heard the word
Obey spoken or saw, except as a golden ash, the ring pass from
hand to hand. All was movement and confusion. And up they rose
with the organ booming and the lightning playing and the rain
pouring, and the Lady Orlando, with her ring on her nger, went
out into the court in her thin dress and held the swinging stirrup, for
the horse was bitted and bridled and the foam was still on his ank,
for her husband to mount, which he did with one bound, and the
horse leapt forward and Orlando, standing there, cried out
Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine! and he answered her Orlando!
and the words went dashing and circling like wild hawks together
among the belfries and higher and higher, further and further, faster
and faster they circled, till they crashed and fell in a shower of
fragments to the ground; and she went in.
 Chapter VI

Orlando went indoors. It was completely still. It was very silent.

There was the inkpot: there was the pen; there was the manuscript
of her poem, broken o in the middle of a tribute to eternity. She
had been about to say, when Basket and Bartholomew interrupted
with the tea things, nothing changes. And then, in the space of three
seconds and a half, everything had changed – she had broken her
ankle, fallen in love, married Shelmerdine.
There was the wedding ring on her nger to prove it. It was true
that she had put it there herself before she met Shelmerdine, but
that had proved worse than useless. She now turned the ring round
and round, with superstitious reverence, taking care lest it should
slip past the joint of her nger.
‘The wedding ring has to be put on the third nger of the left
hand’, she said, like a child cautiously repeating its lesson, ‘for it to
be of any use at all.’
She spoke thus, aloud and rather more pompously than was her
wont, as if she wished someone whose good opinion she desired to
overhear her. Indeed, she had in mind, now that she was at last able
to collect her thoughts, the e ect that her behaviour would have
had upon the spirit of the age. She was extremely anxious to be
informed whether the steps she had taken in the matter of getting
engaged to Shelmerdine and marrying him met with its approval.
She was certainly feeling more herself. Her nger had not tingled
once, or nothing to count, since that night on the moor. Yet, she
could not deny that she had her doubts. She was married, true; but
if one’s husband was always sailing round Cape Horn, was it
marriage? If one liked him, was it marriage? If one liked other
people, was it marriage? And nally, if one still wished, more than
anything in the whole world, to write poetry, was it marriage? She
had her doubts.
But she would put it to the test. She looked at the ring. She looked
at the inkpot. Did she dare? No, she did not. But she must. No, she
could not. What should she do then? Faint, if possible. But she had
never felt better in her life.
‘Hang it all!’ she cried, with a touch of her old spirit, ‘Here goes!’
And she plunged her pen neck deep in the ink. To her enormous
surprise, there was no explosion. She drew the nib out. It was wet,
but not dripping. She wrote. The words were a little long in coming,
but come they did. Ah! but did they make sense? she wondered, a
panic coming over her lest the pen might have been at some of its
involuntary pranks again. She read,

And then I came to a eld where the springing grass

Was dulled by the hanging cups of fritillaries,

Sullen and foreign-looking, the snaky ower,

Scarfed in dull purple, like Egyptian girls –1

As she wrote she felt some power (remember we are dealing with
the most obscure manifestations of the human spirit) reading over
her shoulder, and when she had written ‘Egyptian girls’, the power
told her to stop. Grass, the power seemed to say, going back with a
ruler such as governesses use to the beginning, is all right; the
hanging cups of fritillaries – admirable; the snaky ower – a
thought, strong from a lady’s pen, perhaps, but Wordsworth, no
doubt, sanctions it; but – girls? Are girls necessary? You have a
husband at the Cape, you say? Ah, well, that’ll do.
And so the spirit passed on.
Orlando now performed in spirit (for all this took place in spirit) a
deep obeisance to the spirit of her age, such as – to compare great
things with small – a traveller, conscious that he has a bundle of
cigars in the corner of his suit case, makes to the customs o cer
who has obligingly made a scribble of white chalk on the lid. For
she was extremely doubtful whether, if the spirit had examined the
contents of her mind carefully, it would not have found something
highly contraband for which she would have had to pay the full
ne. She had only escaped by the skin of her teeth. She had just
managed, by some dexterous deference to the spirit of the age, by
putting on a ring and nding a man on a moor, by loving nature and
being no satirist, cynic, or psychologist – any one of which goods
would have been discovered at once – to pass its examination
successfully. And she heaved a deep sigh of relief, as, indeed, well
she might, for the transaction between a writer and the spirit of the
age is one of in nite delicacy, and upon a nice arrangement
between the two the whole fortune of his works depends. Orlando
had so ordered it that she was in an extremely happy position; she
need neither ght her age, nor submit to it; she was of it, yet
remained herself. Now, therefore, she could write, and write she
did. She wrote. She wrote. She wrote.

It was now November. After November, comes December. Then

January, February, March, and April. After April comes May. June,
July, August follow. Next is September. Then October, and so,
behold, here we are back at November again, with a whole year
accomplished.
This method of writing biography, though it has its merits, is a
little bare, perhaps, and the reader, if we go on with it, may
complain that he could recite the calendar for himself and so save
his pocket whatever sum the Hogarth Press2 may think proper to
charge for this book. But what can the biographer do when his
subject has put him in the predicament into which Orlando has now
put us? Life, it has been agreed by everyone whose opinion is worth
consulting, is the only t subject for novelist or biographer; life, the
same authorities have decided, has nothing whatever to do with
sitting still in a chair and thinking. Thought and life are as the poles
asunder. Therefore –since sitting in a chair and thinking is precisely
what Orlando is doing now – there is nothing for it but to recite the
calendar, tell one’s beads, blow one’s nose, stir the re, look out of
the window, until she has done. Orlando sat so still that you could
have heard a pin drop. Would, indeed, that a pin had dropped!
Markmaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine, Esquire
That would have been life of a kind. Or if a butter y had uttered
through the window and settled on her chair, one could write about
that. Or suppose she had got up and killed a wasp. Then, at once,
we could out with our pens and write. For there would be
bloodshed, if only the blood of a wasp. Where there is blood there is
life. And if killing a wasp is the merest tri e compared with killing a
man, still it is a tter subject for novelist or biographer than this
mere wool-gathering; this thinking; this sitting in a chair day in, day
out, with a cigarette and a sheet of paper and a pen and an inkpot.
If only subjects, we might complain (for our patience is wearing
thin), had more consideration for their biographers! What is more
irritating than to see one’s subject, on whom one has lavished so
much time and trouble, slipping out of one’s grasp altogether and
indulging – witness her sighs and gasps, her ushing, her palings,
her eyes now bright as lamps, now haggard as dawns – what is more
humiliating than to see all this dumb show of emotion and
excitement gone through before our eyes when we know that what
causes it – thought and imagination – are of no importance
whatsoever?
But Orlando was a woman – Lord Palmerston had just proved it.
And when we are writing the life of a woman, we may, it is agreed,
waive our demand for action, and substitute love instead. Love, the
poet3 has said, is woman’s whole existence. And if we look for a
moment at Orlando writing at her table, we must admit that never
was there a woman more tted for that calling. Surely, since she is a
woman, and a beautiful woman, and a woman in the prime of life,
she will soon give over this pretence of writing and thinking and
begin at least to think of a gamekeeper4 (and as long as she thinks
of a man, nobody objects to a woman thinking). And then she will
write him a little note (and as long as she writes little notes nobody
objects to a woman writing either) and make an assignation for
Sunday dusk and Sunday dusk will come; and the gamekeeper will
whistle under the window – all of which is, of course, the very stu
of life and the only possible subject for ction. Surely Orlando must
have done one of these things? Alas – a thousand times, alas,
Orlando did none of them. Must it then be admitted that Orlando
was one of those monsters of iniquity who do not love? She was
kind to dogs, faithful to friends, generosity itself to a dozen starving
poets, had a passion for poetry. But love – as the male novelists
de ne it – and who, after all, speak with greater authority? – has
nothing whatever to do with kindness, delity, generosity, or
poetry. Love is slipping o one’s petticoat and— But we all know
what love is. Did Orlando do that? Truth compels us to say no, she
did not. If then, the subject of one’s biography will neither love nor
kill, but will only think and imagine, we may conclude that he or
she is no better than a corpse and so leave her.
The only resource now left us is to look out of the window. There
were sparrows; there were starlings; there were a number of doves,
and one or two rooks, all occupied after their fashion. One nds a
worm, another a snail. One utters to a branch, another takes a
little run on the turf. Then a servant crosses the courtyard, wearing
a green baize apron. Presumably he is engaged on some intrigue
with one of the maids in the pantry, but as no visible proof is
o ered us, in the courtyard, we can but hope for the best and leave
it. Clouds pass, thin or thick, with some disturbance of the colour of
the grass beneath. The sundial registers the hour in its usual cryptic
way. One’s mind begins tossing up a question or two, idly, vainly,
about this same life. Life, it sings, or croons rather, like a kettle on a
hob, Life, life, what art thou? Light or darkness, the baize apron of
the under footman or the shadow of the starling on the grass?
Let us go, then,5 exploring, this summer morning, when all are
adoring the plum blossom and the bee. And humming and hawing,
let us ask of the starling (who is a more sociable bird than the lark)
what he may think on the brink of the dust-bin, whence he picks
among the sticks combings of scullion’s hair. What’s life, we ask,
leaning on the farmyard gate; Life, Life, Life! cries the bird, as if he
had heard, and knew precisely, what we meant by this bothering
prying habit of ours of asking questions indoors and out and
peeping and picking at daisies as the way is of writers when they
don’t know what to say next. Then they come here, says the bird,
and ask me what life is; Life, Life, Life!
We trudge on then by the moor path, to the high brow of the
wine-blue purple-dark hill, and ing ourselves down there, and
dream there and see there a grasshopper, carting back to his home
in the hollow, a straw. And he says (if sawings like his can be given
a name so sacred and tender) Life’s labour, or so we interpret the
whirr of his dust-choked gullet. And the ant agrees and the bees, but
if we lie here long enough to ask the moths, when they come at
evening, stealing among the paler heather bells, they will breathe in
our ears such wild nonsense as one hears from telegraph wires in
snow storms; tee-hee, haw-haw. Laughter, Laughter! the moths say.
Having asked then of man and of bird and the insects, for sh,
men tell us, who have lived in green caves, solitary for years to hear
them speak, never, never say, and so perhaps know what life is –
having asked them all and grown no wiser, but only older and
colder (for did we not pray once in a way to wrap up in a book
something so hard, so rare, one could swear it was life’s meaning?)
back we must go and say straight out to the reader who waits a-
tiptoe to hear what life is – alas, we don’t know.

At this moment, but only just in time to save the book from
extinction, Orlando pushed away her chair, stretched her arms,
dropped her pen, came to the window, and exclaimed, ‘Done!’
She was almost felled to the ground by the extraordinary sight
which now met her eyes. There was the garden and some birds. The
world was going on as usual. All the time she was writing the world
had continued.
‘And if I were dead, it would be just the same!’ she exclaimed.
Such was the intensity of her feelings that she could even imagine
that she had su ered dissolution, and perhaps some faintness
actually attacked her. For a moment she stood looking at the fair,
indi erent spectacle with staring eyes. At length she was revived in
a singular way. The manuscript which reposed above her heart
began shu ing and beating as if it were a living thing, and, what
was still odder, and showed how ne a sympathy was between
them, Orlando, by inclining her head, could make out what it was
that it was saying. It wanted to be read. It must be read. It would
die in her bosom if it were not read. For the rst time in her life she
turned with violence against nature. Elk-hounds and rose bushes
were about her in profusion. But elk-hounds and rose bushes can
none of them read. It is a lamentable oversight on the part of
Providence which had never struck her before. Human beings alone
are thus gifted. Human beings had become necessary. She rang the
bell. She ordered the carriage to take her to London at once.
‘There’s just time to catch the eleven forty- ve, M’Lady’ said
Basket. Orlando had not yet realised the invention of the steam
engine, but such was her absorption in the su erings of a being,
who, though not herself, yet entirely depended on her, that she saw
a railway train for the rst time, took her seat in a railway carriage,
and had the rug arranged about her knees without giving a thought
to ‘that stupendous invention, which had (the historians say)
completely changed the face of Europe in the past twenty years’ (as,
indeed, happens much more frequently than historians suppose).
She noticed only that it was extremely smutty; rattled horribly; and
the windows stuck. Lost in thought, she was whirled up to London
in something less than an hour and stood on the platform at Charing
Cross, not knowing where to go.
The old house at Blackfriars, where she had spent so many
pleasant days in the eighteenth century, was now sold, part to the
Salvation Army, part to an umbrella factory. She had bought
another in Mayfair6 which was sanitary, convenient, and in the
heart of the fashionable world, but was it in Mayfair that her poem
would be relieved of its desire? Pray God, she thought, remembering
the brightness of their ladyships’ eyes and the symmetry of their
lordships’ legs, they haven’t taken to reading there. For that would
be a thousand pities. Then there was Lady R.’s. The same sort of talk
would be going on there still, she had no doubt. The gout might
have shifted from the General’s left leg to his right, perhaps. Mr. L.
might have stayed ten days with R. instead of T. Then Mr. Pope
would come in. Oh! but Mr. Pope was dead. Who were the wits
now, she wondered – but that was not a question one could put to a
porter, and so she moved on. Her ears were now distracted by the
jingling of innumerable bells on the heads of innumerable horses.
Fleets of the strangest little boxes on wheels were drawn up by the
pavement. She walked out into the Strand. There the uproar was
even worse. Vehicles of all sizes, drawn by blood horses and by dray
horses, conveying one solitary dowager or crowded to the top by
whiskered men in silk hats, were inextricably mixed. Carriages,
carts, and omnibuses seemed to her eyes, so long used to the look of
a plain sheet of foolscap, alarmingly at loggerheads; and to her ears,
attuned to a pen scratching, the uproar of the street sounded
violently and hideously cacophonous. Every inch of the pavement
was crowded. Streams of people, threading in and out between their
own bodies and the lurching and lumbering tra c with incredible
agility, poured incessantly east and west. Along the edge of the
pavement stood men, holding out trays of toys, and bawled. At
corners, women sat beside great baskets of spring owers and
bawled. Boys running in and out of the horses’ noses, holding
printed sheets to their bodies, bawled too, Disaster! Disaster! At rst
Orlando supposed that she had arrived at some moment of national
crisis; but whether it was happy or tragic, she could not tell. She
looked anxiously at people’s faces. But that confused her still more.
Here would come by a man sunk in despair, muttering to himself as
if he knew some terrible sorrow. Past him would nudge a fat, jolly-
faced fellow, shouldering his way along as if it were a festival for all
the world. Indeed, she came to the conclusion that there was neither
rhyme nor reason in any of it. Each man and each woman was bent
on his own a airs. And where was she to go?
She walked on without thinking, up one street and down another,
by vast windows piled with handbags, and mirrors, and dressing
gowns, and owers, and shing rods, and luncheon baskets; while
stu of every hue and pattern, thickness or thinness, was looped and
festooned and ballooned across and across. Sometimes she passed
down avenues of sedate mansions, soberly numbered ‘one’, ‘two’,
‘three’, and so on right up to two or three hundred, each the copy of
the other, with two pillars and six steps and a pair of curtains neatly
drawn and family luncheons laid on tables, and a parrot looking out
of one window and a man servant out of another, until her mind
was dizzied with the monotony. Then she came to great open
squares with black, shiny, tightly buttoned statues of fat men in the
middle, and war-horses prancing, and columns rising and fountains
falling and pigeons uttering. So she walked and walked along
pavements between houses until she felt very hungry, and
something uttering above her heart rebuked her with having
forgotten all about it. It was her manuscript, ‘The Oak Tree’.
She was confounded at her own neglect. She stopped dead where
she stood. No coach was in sight. The street, which was wide and
handsome, was singularly empty. Only one elderly gentleman was
approaching. There was something vaguely familiar to her in his
walk. As he came nearer, she felt certain that she had met him at
some time or other. But where? Could it be that this gentleman, so
neat, so portly, so prosperous, with a cane in his hand and a ower
in his button-hole, with a pink, plump face, and combed white
moustaches, could it be, Yes, by jove, it was! – her old, her very old
friend, Nick Greene!
At the same time he looked at her; remembered her; recognised
her. ‘The Lady Orlando!’ he cried, sweeping his silk hat almost in
the dust.
‘Sir Nicholas!’7 she exclaimed. For she was made aware intuitively
by something in his bearing that the scurrilous penny-a-liner, who
had lampooned her and many another in the time of Queen
Elizabeth, was now risen in the world and become certainly a
Knight and doubtless a dozen other ne things into the bargain.
With another bow, he acknowledged that her conclusion was
correct; he was a Knight; he was a Litt.D.; he was a Professor. He
was the author of a score of volumes. He was, in short, the most
in uential critic of the Victorian age.
 A violent tumult of emotion besieged her at meeting the man who
had caused her, years ago, so much pain. Could this be the plaguey,
restless fellow who had burnt holes in her carpets, and toasted
cheese in the Italian replace and told such merry stories of
Marlowe and the rest that they had seen the sun rise nine nights out
of ten? He was now sprucely dressed in a grey morning suit, had a
pink ower in his button-hole, and grey suede gloves to match. But
even as she marvelled, he made another profound bow, and asked
her whether she would honour him by lunching with him? The bow
was a thought overdone perhaps, but the imitation of ne breeding
was creditable. She followed him, wondering, into a superb
restaurant, all red plush, white table-cloths, and silver cruets, as
unlike as could be the old tavern or co ee house with its sanded
oor, its wooden benches, its bowls of punch and chocolate, and its
broadsheets and spittoons. He laid his gloves neatly on the table
beside him. Still she could hardly believe that he was the same man.
His nails were clean; where they used to be an inch long. His chin
was shaved; where a black beard used to sprout. He wore gold
sleeve-links; where his ragged linen used to dip in the broth. It was
not, indeed, until he had ordered the wine, which he did with a care
that reminded her of his taste in Malmsey long ago, that she was
convinced he was the same man. ‘Ah!’ he said, heaving a little sigh,
which was yet comfortable enough, ‘ah! my dear lady, the great
days of literature are over. Marlowe, Shakespeare, Ben Jonson –
those were the giants. Dryden, Pope, Addison – those were the
heroes. All, all are dead now. And whom have they left us?
Tennyson, Browning, Carlyle!’ – he threw an immense amount of
scorn into his voice. ‘The truth of it is,’ he said, pouring himself a
glass of wine, ‘that all our young writers are in the pay of
booksellers. They turn out any trash that serves to pay their tailor’s
bills. It is an age’, he said, helping himself to hors-d’œuvres, ‘marked
by precious conceits and wild experiments – none of which the
Elizabethans would have tolerated for an instant.’
‘No, my dear lady,’ he continued, passing with approval the turbot
au gratin, which the waiter exhibited for his sanction, ‘the great
days are over. We live in degenerate times. We must cherish the
past; honour those writers – there are still a few left of ’em – who
take antiquity for their model and write, not for pay but—’ Here
Orlando almost shouted ‘Glawr!’ Indeed she could have sworn that
she had heard him say the very same things three hundred years
ago. The names were di erent, of course, but the spirit was the
same. Nick Greene had not changed, for all his knighthood. And yet,
some change there was. For while he ran on about taking Addison
as one’s model (it had been Cicero once, she thought) and lying in
bed of a morning (which she was proud to think her pension paid
quarterly enabled him to do) rolling the best works of the best
authors round and round on one’s tongue for an hour, at least,
before setting pen to paper, so that the vulgarity of the present time
and the deplorable condition of our native tongue (he had lived long
in America, she believed) might be puri ed – while he ran on in
much the same way that Greene had run on three hundred years
ago, she had time to ask herself, how was it then that he had
changed? He had grown plump; but he was a man verging on
seventy. He had grown sleek: literature had been a prosperous
pursuit evidently; but somehow the old restless, uneasy vivacity had
gone. His stories, brilliant as they were, were no longer quite so free
and easy. He mentioned, it is true, ‘my dear friend Pope’ or ‘my
illustrious friend Addison’ every other second, but he had an air of
respectability about him which was depressing, and he preferred, it
seemed, to enlighten her about the doings and sayings of her own
blood relations rather than tell her, as he used to do, scandal about
the poets.
Orlando was unaccountably disappointed. She had thought of
literature all these years (her seclusion, her rank, her sex must be
her excuse) as something wild as the wind, hot as re, swift as
lightning; something errant, incalculable, abrupt, and behold,
literature was an elderly gentleman in a grey suit talking about
duchesses. The violence of her disillusionment was such that some
hook or button fastening the upper part of her dress burst open, and
out upon the table fell ‘The Oak Tree’, a poem.
‘A manuscript!’ said Sir Nicholas, putting on his gold pince-nez.
‘How interesting, how excessively interesting! Permit me to look at
it.’ And once more, after an interval of some three hundred years,
Nicholas Greene took Orlando’s poem and, laying it down among
the co ee cups and the liqueur glasses, began to read it. But now his
verdict was very di erent from what it had been then. It reminded
him, he said as he turned over the pages, of Addison’s Cato. It
compared favourably with Thomson’s Seasons.8 There was no trace
in it, he was thankful to say, of the modern spirit. It was composed
with a regard to truth, to nature, to the dictates of the human heart,
which was rare indeed, in these days of unscrupulous eccentricity. It
must, of course, be published instantly.
Really Orlando did not know what he meant. She had always
carried her manuscripts about with her in the bosom of her dress.
The idea tickled Sir Nicholas considerably.
‘But what about royalties?’ he asked.
Orlando’s mind ew to Buckingham Palace and some dusky
potentates who happened to be staying there.
Sir Nicholas was highly diverted. He explained that he was
alluding to the fact that Messrs.—9 (here he mentioned a well-
known rm of publishers) would be delighted, if he wrote them a
line, to put the book on their list. He could probably arrange for a
royalty of ten per cent on all copies up to two thousand; after that it
would be fteen. As for the reviewers, he would himself write a line
to Mr.—, who was the most in uential; then a compliment – say a
little pu of her own poems – addressed to the wife of the editor of
the — never did any harm. He would call —. So he ran on. Orlando
understood nothing of all this, and from old experience did not
altogether trust his good nature, but there was nothing for it but to
submit to what was evidently his wish and the fervent desire of the
poem itself. So Sir Nicholas made the blood-stained packet into a
neat parcel; attened it into his breast pocket, lest it should disturb
the set of his coat; and with many compliments on both sides, they
parted.
 Orlando walked up the street. Now that the poem was gone –and
she felt a bare place in her breast where she had been used to carry
it – she had nothing to do but re ect upon whatever she liked – the
extraordinary chances it might be of the human lot. Here she was in
St. James’s Street; a married woman; with a ring on her nger;
where there had been a co ee house once there was now a
restaurant; it was about half past three in the afternoon; the sun was
shining; there were three pigeons; a mongrel terrier dog; two
hansom cabs and a barouche landau. What then, was Life? The
thought popped into her head violently, irrelevantly (unless old
Greene were somehow the cause of it). And it may be taken as a
comment, adverse or favourable, as the reader chooses to consider it
upon her relations with her husband (who was at the Horn), that
whenever anything popped violently into her head, she went
straight to the nearest telegraph o ce and wired to him. There was
one, as it happened, close at hand. ‘My God Shel’, she wired; ‘life
literature Greene toady –’ here she dropped into a cypher
language10 which they had invented between them so that a whole
spiritual state of the utmost complexity might be conveyed in a
word or two without the telegraph clerk being any the wiser, and
added the words ‘Rattigan Glumphoboo’, which summed it up
precisely. For not only had the events of the morning made a deep
impression on her, but it cannot have escaped the reader’s attention
that Orlando was growing up – which is not necessarily growing
better – and ‘Rattigan Glumphoboo’ described a very complicated
spiritual state – which if the reader puts all his intelligence at our
service he may discover for himself.
There could be no answer to her telegram for some hours; indeed,
it was probable, she thought, glancing at the sky, where the upper
clouds raced swiftly past, that there was a gale at Cape Horn, so that
her husband would be at the mast-head, as likelyas not, or cutting
away some tattered spar, or even alone in a boat with a biscuit. And
so, leaving the post o ce, she turned to beguile herself into the next
shop, which was a shop so common in our day that it needs no
description, yet, to her eyes, strange in the extreme; a shop where
they sold books. All her life long Orlando had known manuscripts;
she had held in her hands the rough brown sheets on which Spenser
had written in his little crabbed hand; she had seen Shakespeare’s
script and Milton’s. She owned, indeed, a fair number of quartos and
folios, often with a sonnet in her praise in them and sometimes a
lock of hair. But these innumerable little volumes, bright, identical,
ephemeral, for they seemed bound in cardboard and printed on
tissue paper, surprised her in nitely. The whole works of
Shakespeare cost half a crown and could be put in your pocket. One
could hardly read them, indeed, the print was so small, but it was a
marvel, none the less. ‘Works’ – the works of every writer she had
known or heard of and many more stretched from end to end of the
long shelves. On tables and chairs, more ‘works’ were piled and
tumbled, and these she saw, turning a page or two, were often
works about other works by Sir Nicholas and a score of others
whom, in her ignorance, she supposed, since they were bound and
printed, to be very great writers too. So she gave an astounding
order to the bookseller to send her everything of any importance in
the shop and left.
She turned into Hyde Park, which she had known of old (beneath
that cleft tree, she remembered, the Duke of Hamilton fell run
through the body by Lord Mohun11), and her lips, which are often
to blame in the matter, began framing the words of her telegram
into a senseless singsong: life literature Greene toady Rattigan
Glumphoboo; so that several park keepers looked at her with
suspicion and were only brought to a favourable opinion of her
sanity by noticing the pearl necklace which she wore. She had
carried o a sheaf of papers and critical journals from the book
shop, and at length, inging herself on her elbow beneath a tree, she
spread these pages round her and did her best to fathom the noble
art of prose composition as these masters practised it. For still the
old credulity was alive in her; even the blurred type of a weekly
newspaper had some sanctity in her eyes. So she read, lying on her
elbow, an article by Sir Nicholas on the collected works of a man
she had once known John Donne. But she had pitched herself,
without knowing it, not far from the Serpentine.12 The barking of a
thousand dogs sounded in her ears. Carriage wheels rushed
ceaselessly in a circle. Leaves sighed overhead. Now and again a
braided skirt and a pair of tight scarlet trousers crossed the grass
within a few steps of her. Once a gigantic rubber ball bounced on
the newspaper. Violets, oranges, reds, and blues broke through the
interstices of the leaves and sparkled in the emerald on her nger.
She read a sentence and looked up at the sky; she looked up at the
sky and looked down at the newspaper. Life? Literature? One to be
made into the other? But how monstrously di cult! For – here came
by a pair of tight scarlet trousers – how would Addison have put
that? Here came two dogs dancing13 on their hind legs. How would
Lamb have described that? For reading Sir Nicholas and his friends
(as she did in the intervals of looking about her), she somehow got
the impression – here she rose and walked – they made one feel – it
was an extremely uncomfortable feeling – one must never, never say
what one thought. (She stood on the banks of the Serpentine. It was
a bronze colour; spider-thin boats were skimming from side to side.)
They made one feel, she continued, that one must always, always
write like somebody else. (The tears formed themselves in her eyes.)
For really, she thought, pushing a little boat o with her toe, I don’t
think I could (here the whole of Sir Nicholas’ article came before her
as articles do, ten minutes after they are read, with the look of his
room, his head, his cat, his writing-table, and the time of the day
thrown in), I don’t think I could, she continued, considering the
article from this point of view, sit in a study, no, it’s not a study, it’s
a mouldy kind of drawing-room, all day long, and talk to pretty
young men, and tell them little anecdotes, which they mustn’t
repeat, about what Tupper said about Smiles;14 and then, she
continued, weeping bitterly, they’re all so manly; and then, I do
detest Duchesses; and I don’t like cake; and though I’m spiteful
enough, I could never learn to be as spiteful as all that, so how can I
be a critic and write the best English prose of my time? Damn it all!
she exclaimed, launching a penny steamer so vigorously that the
poor little boat almost sank in the bronze-coloured waves.
Now, the truth is that when one has been in a state of mind (as
nurses call it) – and the tears still stood in Orlando’s eyes – the thing
one is looking at becomes, not itself, but another thing, which is
bigger and much more important and yet remains the same thing. If
one looks at the Serpentine in this state of mind, the waves soon
become just as big as the waves on the Atlantic; the toy boats
become indistinguishable from ocean liners. So Orlando mistook the
toy boat for her husband’s brig; and the wave she had made with
her toe for a mountain of water o Cape Horn; and as she watched
the toy boat climb the ripple, she thought she saw Bonthrop’s ship
climb up and up a glassy wall; up and up it went, and a white crest
with a thousand deaths in it arched over it; and through the
thousand deaths it went and disappeared – ‘It’s sunk!’ she cried out
in an agony – and then, behold, there it was again sailing along safe
and sound among the ducks on the other side of the Atlantic.
‘Ecstasy!’ she cried. ‘Ecstasy! Where’s the post o ce?’ she
wondered. ‘For I must wire at once to Shel and tell him …’ And
repeating ‘A toy boat on the Serpentine’, and ‘Ecstasy’, alternately,
for the thoughts were interchangeable and meant exactly the same
thing, she hurried towards Park Lane.
‘A toy boat, a toy boat, a toy boat’ she repeated, thus enforcing
upon herself the fact that it is not articles by Nick Greene on John
Donne nor eight-hour bills nor covenants nor factory acts15 that
matter; it’s something useless, sudden, violent; something that costs
a life; red, blue, purple; a spirt; a splash; like those hyacinths (she
was passing a ne bed of them); free from taint, dependence, soilure
of humanity or care for one’s kind; something rash, ridiculous, like
my hyacinth, husband I mean, Bonthrop: that’s what it is – a toy
boat on the Serpentine,ecstasy – it’s ecstasy that matters. Thus she
spoke aloud, waiting for the carriages to pass at Stanhope Gate, for
the consequence of not living with one’s husband, except when the
wind is sunk, is that one talks nonsense aloud in Park Lane. It would
no doubt have been di erent had she lived all the year round with
him as Queen Victoria recommended. As it was the thought of him
would come upon her in a ash. She found it absolutely necessary to
speak to him instantly. She did not care in the least what nonsense
it might make, or what dislocation it might in ict on the narrative.
Nick Greene’s article had plunged her in the depths of despair; the
toy boat had raised her to the heights of joy. So she repeated:
‘Ecstasy, ecstasy’, as she stood waiting to cross.
But the tra c was heavy that spring afternoon, and kept her
standing there, repeating, ecstasy, ecstasy, or a toy boat on the
Serpentine, while the wealth and power of England sat, as if
sculptured, in hat and cloak, in four-in-hand, victoria and barouche
landau.16 It was as if a golden river had coagulated and massed
itself in golden blocks across Park Lane. The ladies held card-cases
between their ngers; the gentlemen balanced gold-mounted canes
between their knees. She stood there gazing, admiring, awestruck.
One thought only disturbed her, a thought familiar to all who
behold great elephants, or whales of an incredible magnitude, and
that is how do these leviathans to whom obviously stress, change,
and activity are repugnant, propagate their kind? Perhaps, Orlando
thought, looking at the stately, still faces, their time of propagation
is over; this is the fruit; this is the consummation. What she now
beheld was the triumph of an age. Portly and splendid there they
sat. But now, the policeman let fall his hand; the stream became
liquid; the massive conglomeration of splendid objects moved,
dispersed, and disappeared into Piccadilly.
So she crossed Park Lane and went to her house in Curzon Street
where, when the meadow-sweet blew there, she could remember
curlew calling and one very old man with a gun.

She could remember, she thought, stepping across the threshold of

her house, how Lord Chester eld had said – but her memory was
checked. Her discreet eighteenth-century hall, where she could see
Lord Chester eld putting his hat down here and his coat down there
with an elegance of deportment which it was a pleasure to watch,
was now completely littered with parcels. While she had been
sitting in Hyde Park the bookseller had delivered her order, and the
house was crammed – there were parcels slipping down the
staircase – with the whole of Victorian literature done up in grey
paper and neatly tied with string. She carried as many of these
packets as she could to her room, ordered footmen to bring the
others, and, rapidly cutting innumerable strings, was soon
surrounded by innumerable volumes.
 Accustomed to the little literatures 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 names17 separate and distinct
but four great names sunk and embedded in a mass of Alexander
Smiths, Dixons, Blacks, Mil-mans, Buckles, Taines, Paynes, Tuppers,
Jamesons – all vocal, clamorous, prominent, and requiring as much
attention as anybody else. Orlando’s reverence for print had a tough
job set before it, but drawing her chair to the window to get the
bene t of what light might lter 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 Victorian 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 impolitic in the extreme to wrap a ten-pound note round
the sugar tongs when Miss Christina Rossetti18 came to tea; next
(here were half-a-dozen invitations to celebrate centenaries by
dining) that literature since it ate all these dinners must be growing
very corpulent; next (she was invited to a score of lectures on the
In uence of this upon that; the Classical revival; the Romantic
survival, 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 nal conclusion, which was
of the highest importance but which, as we have already much over-
passed our limit of six lines, we must omit.
Orlando, having come to this conclusion, stood looking out of the
window for a considerable space of time. For, when anybody comes
to a conclusion it is as if they had tossed the ball over the net and
must wait for the unseen antagonist to return it to them. What
would be sent her next from the colourless sky above Chester eld
House, she wondered? And with her hands clasped, she stood for a
considerable space of time wondering. Suddenly she started – and
here we could only wish that, as on a former occasion, Purity,
Chastity, and Modesty would push the door ajar and provide, at
least, a breathing space in which we could think how to wrap up
what now has to be told delicately, as a biographer should. But no!
Having thrown their white garment at the naked Orlando and seen
it fall short by several inches, these ladies had given up all
intercourse with her these many years; and were now otherwise
engaged. Is nothing then, going to happen this pale March morning
to mitigate, to veil, to cover, to conceal, to shroud this undeniable
event whatever it may be? For after giving that sudden, violent
start, Orlando –but Heaven be praised, at this very moment there
struck up outside one of these frail, reedy, uty, jerky, old-fashioned
barrel-organs19 which are still sometimes played by Italian organ-
grinders in back streets. Let us accept the intervention, humble
though it is, as if it were the music of the spheres, and allow it, with
all its gasps and groans, to ll this page with sound until the
moment comes which it is impossible to deny is coming; which the
footman has seen coming and the maid-servant; and the reader will
have to see too; for Orlando herself is clearly unable to ignore it any
longer – let the barrel-organ sound and transport us on thought,
which is no more than a little boat, when music sounds, tossing on
the waves; on thought, which is, of all carriers, the most clumsy, the
most erratic, over the roof tops and the back gardens where washing
is hanging to – what is this place? Do you recognise the Green and
in the middle the steeple, and the gates with a lion couchant on
either side? Oh yes, it is Kew! Well, Kew will do. So here then we
are at Kew, and I will show you to-day (the second of March) under
the plum tree, a grape hyacinth, and a crocus, and a bud too, on the
almond tree; so that to walk there is to be thinking of bulbs, hairy
and red, thrust into the earth in October; owering now; and to be
dreaming of more than can rightly be said, and to be taking from its
case a cigarette or cigar even, and to be inging a cloak under (as
the rhyme requires) an oak, and there to sit, waiting the king sher,
which, it is said, was seen once to cross in the evening from bank to
bank.
Wait! Wait! The king sher comes; the king sher comes not.
 Behold, meanwhile, the factory chimneys, and their smoke; behold
the city clerks ashing by in their outrigger.20 Behold the old lady
taking her dog for a walk and the servant girl wearing her new hat
for the rst time not at the right angle. Behold them all. Though
Heaven has mercifully decreed that the secrets of all hearts are
hidden so that we are lured on for ever to suspect something,
perhaps, that does not exist; still through our cigarette smoke, we
see blaze up and salute the splendid ful lment of natural desires for
a hat, for a boat, for a rat in a ditch; as once one saw blazing – such
silly hops and skips the mind takes when it slops like this all over
the saucer and the barrel-organ plays –saw blazing a re in a eld
against minarets near Constantinople.
Hail! natural desire! Hail! happiness! divine happiness! and
pleasure of all sorts, owers and wine, though one fades and the
other intoxicates; and half-crown tickets out of London on Sundays,
and singing in a dark chapel hymns about death, and anything,
anything that interrupts and confounds the tapping of typewriters
and ling of letters and forging of links and chains, binding the
Empire together. Hail even the crude, red bows on shop girls’ lips
(as if Cupid, very clumsily, dipped his thumb in red ink and
scrawled a token in passing). Hail, happiness! king sher ashing
from bank to bank, and all ful lment of natural desire, whether it is
what the male novelist says it is; or prayer; or denial; hail! in
whatever form it comes, and may there be more forms, and
stranger. For dark ows the stream – would it were true, as the
rhyme hints ‘like a dream’ – but duller and worser than that is our
usual lot; without dreams, but alive, smug, uent, habitual, under
trees whose shade of an olive green drowns the blue of the wing of
the vanishing bird when he darts of a sudden from bank to bank.
Hail, happiness, then, and after happiness, hail not those dreams
which bloat the sharp image as spotted mirrors do the face in a
country-inn parlour; dreams which splinter the whole and tear us
asunder and wound us and split us apart in the night when we
would sleep; but sleep, sleep, so deep that all shapes are ground to
dust of in nite softness, water of dimness inscrutable, and there,
folded, shrouded, like a mummy, like a moth, prone let us lie on the
sand at the bottom of sleep.
But wait! but wait! we are not going, this time, visiting the blind
land. Blue, like a match struck right in the ball of the innermost eye,
he ies, burns, bursts the seal of sleep; the king sher; so that now
oods back re uent like a tide, the red, thick stream of life again;
bubbling, dripping; and we rise, and our eyes (for how handy a
rhyme is to pass us safe over the awkward transition from death to
life) fall on – (here the barrel-organ stops playing abruptly).
‘It’s a very ne boy, M’Lady,’ said Mrs. Banting, the midwife,
putting her rst-born child into Orlando’s arms. In other words
Orlando was safely delivered of a son on Thursday, March the
20th,21 at three o’clock in the morning.

Once more Orlando stood at the window, but let the reader take
courage; nothing of the same sort is going to happen to-day, which
is not, by any means, the same day. No – for if we look out of the
window, as Orlando was doing at the moment, we shall see that
Park Lane itself has considerably changed. Indeed one might stand
there ten minutes or more, as Orlando stood now, without seeing a
single barouche landau. ‘Look at that!’ she exclaimed, some days
later when an absurd truncated carriage without any horses began
to glide about of its own accord. A carriage without any horses
indeed! She was called away just as she said that, but came back
again after a time and had another look out of the window. It was
odd sort of weather nowadays. The sky itself, she could not help
thinking, had changed. It was no longer so thick, so watery, so
prismatic now that King Edward – see, there he was, stepping out of
his neat brougham to go and visit a certain lady opposite22 — had
succeeded Queen Victoria. The clouds had shrunk to a thin gauze;
the sky seemed made of metal, which in hot weather tarnished
verdigris, copper colour or orange as metal does in a fog. It was a
little alarming – this shrinkage. Everything seemed to have shrunk.
Driving past Buckingham Palace last night, there was not a trace of
that vast erection which she had thought everlasting; top hats,
widows’ weeds, trumpets, telescopes, wreaths, all had vanished and
left not a stain, not a puddle even, on the pavement. But it was now
– after another interval she had come back again to her favourite
station in the window – now, in the evening, that the change was
most remarkable. Look at the lights in the houses! At a touch, a
whole room was lit; hundreds of rooms were lit; and one was
precisely the same as the other. One could see everything in the
little square-shaped boxes; there was no privacy; none of those
lingering shadows and odd corners that there used to be; none of
those women in aprons carrying wobbly lamps which they put down
carefully on this table and on that. At a touch, the whole room was
bright. And the sky was bright all night long; and the pavements
were bright; everything was bright. She came back again at mid-
day. How narrow women had grown lately! They looked like stalks
of corn, straight, shining, identical. And men’s faces were as bare as
the palm of one’s hand. The dryness of the atmosphere brought out
the colour in everything and seemed to sti en the muscles of the
cheeks. It was harder to cry now. Water was hot in two seconds. Ivy
had perished or been scraped o houses. Vegetables were less
fertile; families were much smaller. Curtains and covers had been
frizzled up and the walls were bare so that new brilliantly coloured
pictures of real things like streets, umbrellas, apples, were hung in
frames, or painted upon the wood. There was something de nite
and distinct about the age, which reminded her of the eighteenth
century, except that there was a distraction, a desperation – as she
was thinking this, the immensely long tunnel in which she seemed
to have been travelling for hundreds of years widened; the light
poured in; her thoughts became mysteriously tightened and strung
up as if a piano tuner had put his key in her back and stretched the
nerves very taut; at the same time her hearing quickened; she could
hear every whisper and crackle in the room so that the clock ticking
on the mantelpiece beat like a hammer. And so for some seconds the
light went on becoming brighter and brighter, and she saw
everything more and more clearly and the clock ticked louder and
louder until there was a terri c explosion right in her ear. Orlando
leapt as if she had been violently struck on the head. Ten times she
was struck. In fact it was ten o’clock in the morning. It was the
eleventh of October. It was 1928.23 It was the present moment.
No one need wonder that Orlando started, pressed her hand to her
heart, and turned pale. For what more terrifying revelation can
there be than that it is the present moment? That we survive the
shock at all is only possible because the past shelters us on one side
and the future on another. But we have no time now for re ections;
Orlando was terribly late already. She ran downstairs, she jumped
into her motor-car, she pressed the self-starter and was o . Vast
blue blocks of building rose into the air; the red cowls of chimneys
were spotted irregularly across the sky; the road shone like silver-
headed nails; omnibuses bore down upon her with sculptured white-
faced drivers; she noticed sponges, bird-cages, boxes of green
American cloth. But she did not allow these sights to sink into her
mind even the fraction of an inch as she crossed the narrow plank of
the present, lest she should fall into the raging torrent beneath.
‘Why don’t you look where you’re going to? … Put your hand out,
can’t you?’ – that was all she said sharply, as if the words were
jerked out of her. For the streets were immensely crowded; people
crossed without looking where they were going. People buzzed and
hummed round the plate-glass windows within which one could see
a glow of red, a blaze of yellow, as if they were bees, Orlando
thought – but her thought that they were bees was violently snipped
o and she saw, regaining perspective with one ick of her eye, that
they were bodies. ‘Why don’t you look where you’re going?’ she
snapped out.
At last, however, she drew up at Marshall & Snelgrove’s24 and
went into the shop. Shade and scent enveloped her. The present fell
from her like drops of scalding water. Light swayed up and down
like thin stu s pu ed out by a summer breeze. She took a list from
her bag and began reading in a curious sti voice at rst as if she
were holding the words – boys’ boots, bath salts, sardines – under a
tap of many-coloured water. She watched them change as the light
fell on them. Bath and boots became blunt, obtuse; sardines serrated
itself like a saw. So she stood in the ground- oor department of
Messrs. Marshall & Snelgrove; looked this way and that; snu ed this
smell and that and thus wasted some seconds. Then she got into the
lift, for the good reason that the door stood open; and was shot
smoothly upwards. The very fabric of life now, she thought as she
rose, is magic. In the eighteenth century, we knew how everything
was done; but here I rise through the air; I listen to voices in
America; I see men ying – but how it’s done, I can’t even begin to
wonder. So my belief in magic returns. Now the lift gave a little jerk
as it stopped at the rst oor; and she had a vision of innumerable
coloured stu s aunting in a breeze from which came distinct,
strange smells; and each time the lift stopped and ung its doors
open, there was another slice of the world displayed with all the
smells of that world clinging to it. She was reminded of the river o
Wapping in the time of Elizabeth, where the treasure ships and the
merchant ships used to anchor. How richly and curiously they had
smelt! How well she remembered the feel of rough rubies running
through her ngers when she dabbled them in a treasure sack! And
then lying with Sukey – or whatever her name was – and having
Cumberland’s lantern ashed on them! The Cumberlands had a
house in Portland Place now and she had lunched with them the
other day and ventured a little joke with the old man about
almshouses in the Sheen Road. He had winked. But here as the lift
could go no higher, she must get out – Heaven knows into what
‘department’ as they called it. She stood still to consult her shopping
list, but was blessed if she could see, as the list bade her, bath salts,
or boy’s boots anywhere about. And indeed, she was about to
descend again, without buying anything, but was saved from that
outrage by saying aloud automatically the last item on her list;
which happened to be ‘sheets for a double bed’.
‘Sheets for a double bed,’ she said to a man at a counter and, by a
dispensation of Providence, it was sheets that the man at that
particular counter happened to sell. For Grimsditch, no, Grimsditch
was dead; Bartholomew, no, Bartholomew was dead; Louise then25
— Louise had come to her in a great taking the other day, for she
had found a hole in the bottom of the sheet in the royal bed. Many
kings and queens had slept there – Elizabeth; James; Charles;
George; Victoria; Edward; no wonder the sheet had a hole in it. But
Louise was positive she knew who had done it. It was the Prince
Consort.
 ‘Sale bosch!’ she said (for there had been another war; this time
against the Germans).
‘Sheets for a double bed,’ Orlando repeated dreamily, for a double
bed with a silver counterpane in a room tted in a taste which she
now thought perhaps a little vulgar – all in silver;26 but she had
furnished it when she had a passion for that metal. While the man
went to get sheets for a double bed, she took out a little looking-
glass and a powder pu . Women were not nearly as roundabout in
their ways, she thought, powdering herself with the greatest
unconcern, as they had been when she herself rst turned woman
and lay on the deck of the Enamoured Lady. She gave her nose the
right tint deliberately. She never touched her cheeks. Honestly,
though she was now thirty-six, she scarcely looked a day older. She
looked just as pouting, as sulky, as handsome, as rosy (like a
million-candled Christmas tree, Sasha had said) as she had done that
day on the ice, when the Thames was frozen and they had gone
skating—
‘The best Irish linen, Ma’am’ said the shopman, spreading the
sheets on the counter – and they had met an old woman picking up
sticks. Here, as she was ngering the linen abstractedly, one of the
swing-doors between the departments opened and let through,
perhaps from the fancy-goods department, a whi of scent, waxen,
tinted as if from pink candles, and the scent curved like a shell
round a gure – was it a boy’s or was it a girl’s? –young, slender,
seductive – a girl, by God! furred, pearled, in Russian trousers; but
faithless, faithless!
 ‘Faithless!’ cried Orlando (the man had gone) and all the shop
seemed to pitch and toss with yellow water and far o she saw the
masts of the Russian ship standing out to sea, and then,
miraculously (perhaps the door opened again) the conch which the
scent had made became a platform, a dais, o which stepped a fat,
furred woman, marvellously well preserved, seductive, diademed, a
Grand Duke’s mistress; she who, leaning over the banks of the
Volga, eating sandwiches, had watched men drown; and began
walking down the shop towards her.
‘Oh Sasha!’ Orlando cried. Really, she was shocked that she should
have come to this; she had grown so fat; so lethargic; and she bowed
her head over the linen so that this apparition of a grey woman in
fur, and a girl in Russian trousers, with all these smells of wax
candles, white owers, and old ships that it brought with it might
pass behind her back unseen.
‘Any napkins, towels, dusters to-day, Ma’am?’ the shopman
persisted. And it is enormously to the credit of the shopping list,
which Orlando now consulted, that she was able to reply with every
appearance of composure, that there was only one thing in the
world she wanted and that was bath salts; which was in another
department.
But descending in the lift again – so insidious is the repetition of
any scene – she was again sunk far beneath the present moment;
and thought when the lift bumped on the ground, that she heard a
pot broken against a river bank. As for nding the right department,
whatever it might be, she stood engrossed among the handbags,
deaf to the suggestions of all the polite, black, combed, sprightly
shop assistants, who descending as they did equally and some of
them, perhaps, as proudly, even from such depths of the past as she
did, chose to let down the impervious screen of the present so that
to-day they appeared shop assistants in Marshall & Snelgrove’s
merely. Orlando stood there hesitating. Through the great glass
doors she could see the tra c in Oxford Street. Omnibus seemed to
pile itself upon omnibus and then to jerk itself apart. So the ice
blocks had pitched and tossed that day on the Thames. An old
nobleman in furred slippers had sat astride one of them. There he
went – she could see him now – calling down maledictions upon the
Irish rebels. He had sunk there, where her car stood.
‘Time has passed over me,’ she thought, trying to collect herself;
‘this is the oncome of middle age. How strange it is! Nothing is any
longer one thing. I take up a handbag and I think of an old bumboat
woman frozen in the ice. Someone lights a pink candle and I see a
girl in Russian trousers. When I step out of doors – as I do now,’
here she stepped on to the pavement of Oxford Street, ‘what is it
that I taste? Little herbs. I hear goat bells. I see mountains. Turkey?
India? Persia?’ Her eyes lled with tears.
That Orlando had gone a little too far from the present moment
will, perhaps, strike the reader who sees her now preparing to get
into her motor-car with her eyes full of tears and visions of Persian
mountains. And indeed, it cannot be denied that the most successful
practitioners of the art of life, often unknown people by the way,
somehow contrive to synchronise the sixty or seventy di erent times
which beat simultaneously in every normal human system so that
when eleven strikes, all the rest chime in unison, and the present is
neither a violent disruption nor completely forgotten in the past. Of
them we can justly say that they live precisely the sixty-eight or
seventy-two years allotted them on the tombstone. Of the rest some
we know to be dead though they walk among us; some are not yet
born though they go through the forms of life; others are hundreds
of years old though they call themselves thirty-six. The true length
of a person’s life, whatever the Dictionary of National Biography27
may say, is always a matter of dispute. For it is a di cult business –
this time-keeping; nothing more quickly disorders it than contact
with any of the arts; and it may have been her love of poetry that
was to blame for making Orlando lose her shopping list and start
home without the sardines, the bath salts, or the boots. Now as she
stood with her hand on the door of her motor-car, the present again
struck her on the head. Eleven times she was violently assaulted.
‘Confound it all!’ she cried, for it is a great shock to the nervous
system, hearing a clock strike – so much so that for some time now
there is nothing to be said of her save that she frowned slightly,
changed her gears admirably, and cried out, as before, ‘Look where
you’re going!’ ‘Don’t you know your own mind?’ ‘Why didn’t you
say so then?’ while the motor-car shot, swung, squeezed, and slid,
for she was an expert driver, down Regent Street, down Haymarket,
down Northumberland Avenue, over Westminster Bridge, to the left,
straight on, to the right, straight on again …
 The old Kent Road was very crowded on Thursday, the eleventh of
October 1928. People spilt o the pavement. There were women
with shopping bags. Children ran out. There were sales at drapers’
shops. Streets widened and narrowed. Long vistas steadily shrunk
together. Here was a market. Here a funeral. Here a procession with
banners upon which was written ‘Ra—Un’, but what else? Meat was
very red. Butchers stood at the door. Women almost had their heels
sliced o . Amor Vin— that was over a porch. A woman looked out
of a bedroom window, profoundly contemplative, and very still.
Applejohn and Applebed, Undert—.28 Nothing could be seen whole
or read from start to nish. What was seen begun – like two friends
starting to meet each other across the street – was never seen ended.
After twenty minutes the body and mind were like scraps of torn
paper tumbling from a sack and, indeed, the process of motoring
fast out of London so much resembles the chopping up small of
identity which precedes unconsciousness and perhaps death itself
that it is an open question in what sense Orlando can be said to
have existed at the present moment. Indeed we should have given
her over for a person entirely disassembled were it not that here, at
last, one green screen was held out on the right, against which the
little bits of paper fell more slowly; and then another was held out
on the left so that one could see the separate scraps now turning
over by themselves in the air; and then green screens were held
continuously on either side, so that her mind regained the illusion of
holding things within itself and she saw a cottage, a farmyard and
four cows, all precisely life-size.
 When this happened, Orlando heaved a sigh of relief, lit a
cigarette, and pu ed for a minute or two in silence. Then she called
hesitatingly, as if the person she wanted might not be there,
‘Orlando?’ For if there are (at a venture) seventy-six di erent times
all ticking in the mind at once, how many di erent people are there
not – Heaven help us – all having lodgment at one time or another
in the human spirit? Some say two thousand and fty-two. So that it
is the most usual thing in the world for a person to call, directly
they are alone, Orlando? (if that is one’s name) meaning by that,
Come, come! I’m sick to death of this particular self. I want another.
Hence, the astonishing changes we see in our friends. But it is not
altogether plain sailing, either, for though one may say, as Orlando
said (being out in the country and needing another self presumably)
Orlando? still the Orlando she needs may not come; these selves of
which we arebuilt up, one on top of another, as plates are piled on a
waiter’s hand, have attachments elsewhere, sympathies, little
constitutions and rights of their own, call them what you will (and
for many of these things there is no name) so that one will only
come if it is raining, another in a room with green curtains, another
when Mrs. Jones is not there, another if you can promise it a glass
of wine – and so on; for everybody can multiply from his own
experience the di erent terms which his di erent selves have made
with him – and some are too wildly ridiculous to be mentioned in
print at all.
So Orlando, at the turn by the barn, called ‘Orlando?’ with a note
of interrogation in her voice and waited. Orlando did not come.29
 ‘All right then,’ Orlando said, with the good humour people
practise on these occasions; and tried another. For she had a great
variety of selves to call upon, far more than we have been able to
nd room for, since a biography is considered complete if it merely
accounts for six or seven selves, whereas a person may well have as
many thousand. Choosing then, only those selves we have found
room for, Orlando may now have called on the boy who cut the
nigger’s head down; the boy who strung it up again; the boy who sat
on the hill; the boy who saw the poet; the boy who handed the
Queen the bowl of rose water; or she may have called upon the
young man who fell in love with Sasha; or upon the Courtier; or
upon the Ambassador; or upon the Soldier; or upon the Traveller; or
she may have wanted the woman to come to her; the Gipsy; the Fine
Lady; the Hermit; the girl in love with life; the Patroness of Letters;
the woman who called Mar (meaning hot baths and evening res) or
Shelmer-dine (meaning crocuses in autumn woods) or Bonthrop
(meaning the death we die daily) or all three together – which
meant more things than we have space to write out – all were
di erent and she may have called upon any one of them.
Perhaps; but what appeared certain (for we are now in the region
of ‘perhaps’ and ‘appears’) was that the one she needed most kept
aloof, for she was, to hear her talk, changing her selves as quickly as
she drove – there was a new one at every corner – as happens when,
for some unaccountable reason, the conscious self, which is the
uppermost, and has the power to desire, wishes to be nothing but
one self. This is what some people call the true self, and it is, they
say, compact of all the selves we have it in us to be; commanded
and locked up by the Captain self, the Key self, which amalgamates
and controls them all. Orlando was certainly seeking this self as the
reader can judge from overhearing her talk as she drove (and if it is
rambling talk, disconnected, trivial, dull, and sometimes
unintelligible, it is the reader’s fault for listening to a lady talking to
herself; we only copy her words as she spoke them, adding in
brackets which self in our opinion is speaking, but in this we may
well be wrong).
‘What then? Who then?’30 she said. ‘Thirty-six; in a motor-car; a
woman. Yes, but a million other things as well. A snob am I? The
garter in the hall? The leopards? My ancestors? Proud of them? Yes!
Greedy, luxurious, vicious? Am I? (here a new self came in). Don’t
care a damn if I am. Truthful? I think so. Generous? Oh, but that
don’t count (here a new self came in). Lying in bed of a morning
listening to the pigeons on ne linen; silver dishes; wine; maids;
footmen. Spoilt? Perhaps. Too many things for nothing. Hence my
books (here she mentioned fty classical titles; which represented,
so we think, the early romantic works that she tore up). Facile, glib,
romantic. But (here another self came in) a du er, a fumbler. More
clumsy I couldn’t be. And – and – (here she hesitated for a word and
if we suggest ‘Love’ we may be wrong, but certainly she laughed and
blushed and then cried out –) A toad set in emeralds! Harry the
Archduke! Blue-bottles on the ceiling! (here another self came in).
But Nell, Kit, Sasha? (she was sunk in gloom: tears actually shaped
themselves and she had long given over crying). Trees, she said.
(Here another self came in.) I love trees (she was passing a clump)
growing there a thousand years. And barns (she passed a tumble-
down barn at the edge of the road). And sheep dogs (here one came
trotting across the road. She carefully avoided it). And the night.
But people (here another self came in). People? (She repeated it as a
question.) I don’t know. Chattering, spiteful, always telling lies.
(Here she turned into the High Street of her native town, which was
crowded, for it was market day, with farmers, and shepherds, and
old women with hens in baskets.) I like peasants. I understand
crops. But (here another self came skipping over the top of her mind
like the beam from a lighthouse). Fame! (She laughed.) Fame! Seven
editions. A prize. Photographs in the evening papers (here she
alluded to the ‘Oak Tree’ and ‘The Burdett Coutts’ Memorial Prize31
which she had won; and we must snatch space to remark how
discomposing it is for her biographer that this culmination to which
the whole book moved, this peroration with which the book was to
end, should be dashed from us on a laugh casually like this; but the
truth is that when we write of a woman, everything is out of place –
culminations and perorations; the accent never falls where it does
with a man). Fame! she repeated. A poet- a charlatan; both every
morning as regularly as the post comes in. To dine, to meet; to meet,
to dine; fame –fame! (She had here to slow down to pass through
the crowd of market people. But no one noticed her. A porpoise in a
shmonger’s shop32 attracted far more attention than a lady who
had won a prize and might, had she chosen, have worn three
coronets one on top of another on her brow.) Driving very slowly
she now hummed as if it were part of an old song, ‘With my guineas
I’ll buy owering trees, owering trees, owering trees and walk
among my owering trees and tell my sons what fame is’. So she
hummed, and now all her words began to sag here and there like a
barbaric necklace of heavy beads. ‘And walk among my owering
trees’, she sang, accenting the words strongly, ‘and see the moon
rise slow, the waggons go …’ Here she stopped short, and looked
ahead of her intently at the bonnet of the car in profound
meditation.
‘He sat at Twitchett’s table’, she mused, ‘with a dirty ru on …
Was it old Mr. Baker come to measure the timber? Or was it Sh—p
—re?’ (for when we speak names we deeply reverence to ourselves
we never speak them whole). She gazed for ten minutes ahead of
her, letting the car come almost to a standstill.
‘Haunted!’ she cried, suddenly pressing the accelerator. ‘Haunted!
ever since I was a child. There ies the wild goose.33 It ies past the
window out to sea. Up I jumped (she gripped the steering-wheel
tighter) and stretched after it. But the goose ies too fast. I’ve seen
it, here – there – there – England, Persia, Italy. Always it ies fast
out to sea and always I ing after it words like nets (here she ung
her hand out) which shrivel as I’ve seen nets shrivel drawn on deck
with only sea-weed in them; and sometimes there’s an inch of silver
– six words – in the bottom of the net. But never the great sh who
lives in the coral groves.’ Here she bent her head, pondering deeply.
And it was at this moment, when she had ceased to call ‘Orlando’
and was deep in thoughts of something else, that the Orlando whom
she had called came of its own accord; as was proved by the change
that now came over her (she had passed through the lodge gates
and was entering the park).
The whole of her darkened and settled, as when some foil whose
addition makes the round and solidity of a surface is added to it,
and the shallow becomes deep and the near distant; and all is
contained as water is contained by the sides of a well. So she was
now darkened, stilled, and become, with the addition of this
Orlando, what is called, rightly or wrongly, a single self, a real self.
And she fell silent. For it is probable that when people talk aloud,
the selves (of which there may be more than two thousand) are
conscious of disseverment, and are trying to communicate, but when
communication is established they fall silent.
Masterfully, swiftly, she drove up the curving drive between the
elms and oaks through the falling turf of the park whose fall was so
gentle that had it been water it would have spread the beach with a
smooth green tide. Planted here and in solemn groups were beech
trees and oak trees. The deer stepped among them, one white as
snow, another with its head on one side, for some wire netting had
caught in its horns. All this, the trees, deer, and turf, she observed
with the greatest satisfaction as if her mind had become a uid that
owed round things and enclosed them completely. Next minute she
drew up in the courtyard where, for so many hundred years she had
come, on horseback or in coach and six, with men riding before or
coming after; where plumes had tossed, torches ashed, and the
same owering trees that let their leaves drop now had shaken their
blossoms. Now she was alone. The autumn leaves were falling. The
porter opened the great gates. ‘Morning, James’ she said, ‘there’re
some things in the car. Will you bring ‘em in?’ words of no beauty,
interest, or signi cance themselves, it will be conceded, but now so
plumped out with meaning that they fell like ripe nuts from a tree,
and proved that when the shrivelled skin of the ordinary is stu ed
out with meaning it satis es the senses amazingly. This was true
indeed of every movement and action now, usual though they were;
so that to see Orlando change her skirt for a pair of whipcord
breeches and leather jacket, which she did in less than three
minutes, was to be ravished with the beauty of movement as if
Madame Lopokova34 were using her highest art. Then she strode
into the dining-room where her old friends Dryden, Pope, Swift,
Addison regarded her demurely at rst as who should say Here’s the
prize winner! but when they re ected that two hundred guineas was
in question, they nodded their heads approvingly. Two hundred
guineas, they seemed to say; two hundred guineas are not to be
sni ed at. She cut herself a slice of bread and ham, clapped the two
together and began to eat, striding up and down the room, thus
shedding her company habits in a second, without thinking. After
ve or six such turns, she tossed o a glass of red Spanish wine,35
and, lling another which she carried in her hand, strode down the
long corridor and through a dozen drawing-rooms and so began a
perambulation of the house, attended by such elk-hounds and
spaniels as chose to follow her.
 This, too, was all in the day’s routine. As soon would she come
home and leave her own grandmother without a kiss as come back
and leave the house unvisited. She fancied that the rooms
brightened as she came in; stirred, opened their eyes as if they had
been dozing in her absence. She fancied, too, that, hundreds and
thousands of times as she had seen them, they never looked the
same twice, as if so long a life as theirs had stored in them a myriad
moods which changed with winter and summer, bright weather and
dark, and her own fortunes and the people’s characters who visited
them. Polite, they always were to strangers, but a little wary; with
her, they were entirely open and at their ease. Why not indeed?
They had known each other for close on four centuries now. They
had nothing to conceal. She knew their sorrows and joys. She knew
what age each part of them was and its little secrets – a hidden
drawer, a concealed cupboard, or some de ciency perhaps, such as
a part made up, or added later. They, too, knew her in all her moods
and changes. She had hidden nothing from them; had come to them
as boy and woman, crying and dancing, brooding and gay. In this
window-seat,36 she had written her rst verses; in that chapel, she
had been married. And she would be buried here, she re ected,
kneeling on the window-sill in the long gallery and sipping her
Spanish wine. Though she could hardly fancy it, the body of the
heraldic leopard would be making yellow pools on the oor the day
they lowered her to lie among her ancestors. She, who believed in
no immortality, could not help feeling that her soul would come and
go forever with the reds on the panels and the greens on the sofa.
For the room – she had strolled into the Ambassador’s bedroom –
shone like a shell that has lain at the bottom of the sea for centuries
and has been crusted over and painted a million tints by the water;
it was rose and yellow, green and sand-coloured. It was frail as a
shell, as iridescent and as empty. No Ambassador would ever sleep
there again. Ah, but she knew where the heart of the house still
beat. Gently opening a door, she stood on the threshold so that (as
she fancied) the room could not see her and watched the tapestry
rising and falling on the eternal faint breeze which never failed to
move it. Still the hunter rode; still Daphne ew. The heart still beat,
she thought, however faintly, however far withdrawn; the frail
indomitable heart of the immense building.
Now, calling her troop of dogs to her she passed down the gallery
whose oor was laid with whole oak trees sawn across. Rows of
chairs with all their velvets faded stood ranged against the wall
holding their arms out for Elizabeth, for James, for Shakespeare it
might be, for Cecil, who never came. The sight made her gloomy.
She unhooked the rope that fenced them o . She sat on the Queen’s
chair; she opened a manuscript book lying on Lady Betty’s table; she
stirred her ngers in the aged rose leaves; she brushed her short hair
with King James’ silver brushes; she bounced up and down upon his
bed (but no King would ever sleep there again, for all Louise’s new
sheets) and pressed her cheek against the worn silver counterpane
that lay upon it. But everywhere were little lavender bags to keep
the moth out and printed notices, ‘Please do not touch’, which,
though she had put them there herself, seemed to rebuke her. The
house was no longer hers entirely, she sighed. It belonged to time
now; to history; was past the touch and control of the living. Never
would beer be spilt here any more, she thought (she was in the
bedroom that had been old Nick Greene’s), or holes burnt in the
carpet. Never two hundred servants come running and brawling
down the corridors with warming pans and great branches for the
great replaces. Never would ale be brewed and candles made and
saddles fashioned and stone shaped in the workshops outside the
house. Hammers and mallets were silent now. Chairs and beds were
empty; tankards of silver and gold were locked in glass cases. The
great wings of silence beat up and down the empty house.
So she sat at the end of the gallery with her dogs couched round
her, in Queen Elizabeth’s hard arm-chair. The gallery stretched far
away to a point where the light almost failed. It was as a tunnel
bored deep into the past. As her eyes peered down it, she could see
people laughing and talking; the great men she had known; Dryden,
Swift, and Pope; and statesmen in colloquy; and lovers dallying in
the window-seats; and people eating and drinking at the long tables;
and the wood smoke curling round their heads and making them
sneeze and cough. Still further down, she saw sets of splendid
dancers formed for the quadrille.

A uty, frail, but nevertheless stately music began to play. An organ

boomed. A co n was borne into the chapel. A marriage procession
came out of it. Armed men with helmets left for the wars. They
brought banners back from Flodden and Poitiers and stuck them on
the wall. The long gallery lled itself thus, and still peering further,
she thought she could make out at the very end, beyond the
Elizabethans and the Tudors, some one older, further, darker, a
cowled gure, monastic, severe, a monk, who went with his hands
clasped, and a book in them, murmuring—
Like thunder, the stable clock struck four. Never did any
earthquake so demolish a whole town. The gallery and all its
occupants fell to powder. Her own face, that had been dark and
sombre as she gazed, was lit as by an explosion of gunpowder. In
this same light everything near her showed with extreme
distinctness. She saw two ies circling round and noticed the blue
sheen on their bodies; she saw a knot in the wood where her foot
was, and her dog’s ear twitching. At the same time, she heard a
bough creaking in the garden, a sheep coughing in the park, a swift
screaming past the window. Her own body quivered and tingled as
if suddenly stood naked in a hard frost. Yet, she kept, as she had not
done when the clock struck ten in London, complete composure (for
she was now one and entire, and presented, it may be, a larger
surface to the shock of time). She rose, but without precipitation,
called her dogs, and went rmly but with great alertness of
movement down the staircase and out into the garden. Here the
shadows of the plants were miraculously distinct. She noticed the
separate grains of earth in the ower beds as if she had a
microscope stuck to her eye. She saw the intricacy of the twigs of
every tree. Each blade of grass was distinct and the marking of veins
and petals. She saw Stubbs, the gardener, coming along the path,
and every button on his gaiters was visible; she saw Betty and
Prince, the cart horses, and never had she marked so clearly the
white star on Betty’s forehead, and the three long hairs that fell
down below the rest on Prince’s tail. Out in the quadrangle the old
grey walls of the house looked like a scraped new photograph; she
heard the loud speaker
Orlando at the present time
condensing on the terrace a dance tune that people were listening to
in the red-velvet opera house at Vienna.37 Braced and strung up by
the present moment she was also strangely afraid, as if whenever
the gulf of time gaped and let a second through some unknown
danger might come with it. The tension was too relentless and too
rigorous to be endured long without discomfort. She walked more
briskly than she liked, as if her legs were moved for her, through the
garden and out into the park. Here she forced herself, by a great
e ort, to stop by the carpenter’s shop, and to stand stock-still
watching Joe Stubbs fashion a cart wheel. She was standing with
her eye xed on his hand when the quarter struck. It hurtled
through her like a meteor, so hot that no ngers can hold it. She
saw with disgusting vividness that the thumb on Joe’s right hand
was without a nger nail and there was a raised saucer of pink esh
where the nail should have been. The sight was so repulsive that she
felt faint for a moment, but in that moment’s darkness, when her
eyelids ickered, she was relieved of the pressure of the present.
There was something strange in the shadow that the icker of her
eyes cast, something which (as anyone can test for himself by
looking now at the sky) is always absent from the present – whence
its terror, its nondescript character – something one trembles to pin
through the body with a name and call beauty, for it has no body, is
as a shadow without substance or quality of its own, yet has the
power to change whatever it adds itself to. This shadow now, while
she ickered her eye in her faintness in the carpenter’s shop, stole
out, and attaching itself to the innumerable sights she had been
receiving, composed them into something tolerable,
comprehensible. Her mind began to toss like the sea. Yes, she
thought, heaving a deep sigh of relief, as she turned from the
carpenter’s shop to climb the hill, I can begin to live again. I am by
the Serpentine, she thought, the little boat is climbing through the
white arch of a thousand deaths. I am about to understand …
Those were her words, spoken quite distinctly, but we cannot
conceal the fact that she was now a very indi erent witness to the
truth of what was before her and might easily have mistaken a
sheep for a cow, or an old man called Smith for one who was called
Jones and was no relation of his whatever. For the shadow of
faintness which the thumb without a nail had cast had deepened
now, at the back of her brain (which is the part furthest from sight),
into a pool where things dwell in darkness so deep that what they
are we scarcely know. She now looked down into this pool or sea in
which everything is re ected – and, indeed, some say that all our
most violent passions, and art and religion, are the re ections which
we see in the dark hollow at the back of the head when the visible
world is obscured for the time. She looked there now, long, deeply,
profoundly, and immediately the ferny path up the hill along which
she was walking became not entirely a path, but partly the
Serpentine; the hawthorn bushes were partly ladies and gentlemen
sitting with card-cases and gold-mounted canes; the sheep were
partly tall Mayfair houses; everything was partly something else, as
if her mind had become a forest with glades branching here and
there; things came nearer, and further, and mingled and separated
and made the strangest alliances and combinations in an incessant
chequer of light and shade. Except when Canute, the elk-hound,
chased a rabbit and so reminded her that it must be about half-past
four –it was indeed twenty-three minutes to six – she forgot the
time.
The ferny path led, with many turns and windings, higher and
higher to the oak tree, which stood on the top. The tree had grown
bigger, sturdier, and more knotted since she had known it,
somewhere about the year 1588, but it was still in the prime of life.
The little sharply frilled leaves were still uttering thickly on its
branches. Flinging herself on the ground, she felt the bones of the
tree running out like ribs from a spine this way and that beneath
her. She liked to think that she was riding the back of the world.
She liked to attach herself to something hard. As she ung herself
down a little square book bound in red cloth fell from the breast of
her leather jacket – her poem ‘The Oak Tree’. ‘I should have brought
a trowel,’ she re ected. The earth was so shallow over the roots that
it seemed doubtful if she could do as she meant and bury the book
here. Besides, the dogs would dig it up. No luck ever attends these
symbolical celebrations, she thought. Perhaps it would be as well
then to do without them. She had a little speech on the tip of her
tongue which she meant to speak over the book as she buried it. (It
was a copy of the rst edition, signed by author and artist.) ‘I bury
this as a tribute’ she was going to have said, ‘a return to the land of
what the land has given me’ but Lord! once one began mouthing
words aloud, how silly they sounded! She was reminded of old
Greene getting upon a platform the other day comparing her with
Milton38 (save for his blindness) and handing her a cheque for two
hundred guineas. She had thought then, of the oak tree here on its
hill, and what has that got to do with this, she had wondered? What
has praise and fame to do with poetry? What has seven editions (the
book had already gone into no less) got to do with the value of it?
Was not writing poetry a secret transaction, a voice answering a
voice? So that all this chatter and praise and blame and meeting
people who admired one and meeting people who did not admire
one was as ill suited as could be to the thing itself – a voice
answering a voice. What could have been more secret, she thought,
more slow, and like the intercourse of lovers, than the stammering
answer she had made all these years to the old crooning song of the
woods, and the farms and the brown horses standing at the gate,
neck to neck, and the smithy and the kitchen and the elds, so
laboriously bearing wheat, turnips, grass, and the garden blowing
irises and fritillaries?
So she let her book lie unburied and dishevelled on the ground,
and watched the vast view, varied like an ocean oor this evening
with the sun lightening it and the shadows darkening it. There was a
village with a church tower among elm trees; a grey domed manor
house in a park; a spark of light burning on some glass-house; a
farmyard with yellow corn stacks. The elds were marked with
black tree clumps, and beyond the elds stretched long woodlands,
and there was the gleam of a river, and then hills again. In the far
distance Snowdon’s crags broke white among the clouds; she saw
the far Scottish hills and the wild tides that swirl about the
Hebrides. She listened for the sound of gun- ring out at sea. No –
only the wind blew. There was no war to-day. Drake had gone;
Nelson had gone. ‘And there’, she thought, letting her eyes, which
had been looking at these far distances, drop once more to the land
beneath her, ‘was my land once: that Castle between the downs was
mine; and all that moor running almost to the sea was mine.’ Here
the landscape (it must have been some trick of the fading light)
shook itself, heaped itself, let all this encumbrance of houses,
castles, and woods slide o its tent-shaped sides. The bare
mountains of Turkey were before her. It was blazing noon. She
looked straight at the baked hill-side. Goats cropped the sandy tufts
at her feet. An eagle soared above her. The raucous voice of old
Rustum, the gipsy, croaked in her ears, ‘What is your antiquity and
your race, and your possessions compared with this? What do you
need with four hundred bedrooms and silver lids on all your dishes,
and house-maids dusting?’
At this moment some church clock chimed in the valley. The tent-
like landscape collapsed and fell. The present showered down upon
her head once more, but now that the light was fading, gentlier than
before, calling into view nothing detailed, nothing small, but only
misty elds, cottages with lamps in them, the slumbering bulk of a
wood, and a fan-shaped light pushing the darkness before it along
some lane. Whether it had struck nine, ten, or eleven, she could not
say. Night had come –night that she loved of all times, night in
which the re ections in the dark pool of the mind shine more
clearly than by day. It was not necessary to faint now in order to
look deep into the darkness where things shape themselves and to
see in the pool of the mind now Shakespeare, now a girl in Russian
trousers, now a toy boat on the Serpentine, and then the Atlantic
itself, where it storms in great waves past Cape Horn. She looked
into the darkness. There was her husband’s brig, rising to the top of
the wave! Up, it went, and up and up. The white arch of a thousand
deaths rose before it. Oh rash, oh ridiculous man, always sailing, so
uselessly, round Cape Horn in the teeth of a gale! But the brig was
through the arch and out on the other side; it was safe at last!
‘Ecstasy!’ she cried, ‘ecstasy!’ And then the wind sank, the waters
grew calm; and she saw the waves rippling peacefully in the
moonlight.
‘Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine!’ she cried, standing by the
oak tree.
The beautiful, glittering name fell out of the sky like a steel-blue
feather. She watched it fall, turning and twisting like a slow-falling
arrow that cleaves the deep air beautifully. He was coming, as he
always came, in moments of dead calm; when the wave rippled and
the spotted leaves fell slowly over her foot in the autumn woods;
when the leopard was still; the moon was on the waters, and
nothing moved between sky and sea. Then he came.
All was still now. It was near midnight. The moon rose slowly over
the weald. Its light raised a phantom castle upon earth. There stood
the great house with all its windows robed in silver. Of wall or
substance there was none. All was phantom. All was still. All was lit
as for the coming of a dead Queen. Gazing below her, Orlando saw
dark plumes tossing in the courtyard, and torches ickering and
shadows kneeling. A Queen once more stepped from her chariot.
‘The house is at your service, Ma’am’ she cried, curtseying deeply.
‘Nothing has been changed. The dead Lord, my father, shall lead
you in.’
As she spoke, the rst stroke of midnight sounded. The cold breeze
of the present brushed her face with its little breath of fear. She
looked anxiously into the sky. It was dark with clouds now. The
wind roared in her ears. But in the roar of the wind she heard the
roar of an aeroplane39 coming nearer and nearer.
‘Here! Shel, here!’ she cried, baring her breast to the moon (which
now showed bright) so that her pearls glowed like the eggs of some
vast moon-spider. The aeroplane rushed out of the clouds and stood
over her head. It hovered above her. Her pearls burnt like a
phosphorescent are in the darkness.
And as Shelmerdine, now grown a ne 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.
Index

A., Lord, 135

Abbey, Westminster, 39
Addison, Joseph, 119, 138, 145
Alexandra, Queen, 55
Anne, Queen, 136
Archduchess Harriet of Finster-Aarhorn (see Archduke Harry), 77,
126–8
Archduke, Harry, the, 169
Arlington House, 137

Bartholomew, Widow, 161, 162, 165

Bartolus, Captain Nicholas Benedict, 109, 115, 138
Basket, Butler, 163
Boswell, James, 154
Brigge, John Fenner, 90, 94
Browne, Sir Thomas, 51, 54, 57
Browning, Robert, 193

C, Marquis of, 135, 169

Canute, the elk-hound, 169
Carlyle, Thomas, 193
Carpenter, Nurse, 50
Charles the Second, King, 83
Chester eld, Lady, 134
Chester eld, Lord, 148, 201
Chubb, Eusebius, 158
Cicero, 71
Clorinda, 23
Consort, the Prince, 208
Cumberland, Earl of, 21, 208

De and, Madame du, 139

Donne, John, 62, 198
Drake, 226
Dryden, John, 119, 138, 219
Dupper, Mr., 49, 53, 58, 120, 121, 181

Elizabeth, Queen, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 69

Euphrosyne, 23

Favilla, 23
Field, Mrs., 50
Frost, the Great, 24

Gladstone, Mrs., 177

Greene, Nicholas (afterwards Sir), 58–65, 71, 192, 225
Greenwich, 60
Grimsditch, Mrs., 49, 51, 53, 74, 120, 121, 208
Gulliver’s Travels, 146
Gwynn, Nell, 83

Hall, the falconer, 53

Hartopp, Miss Penelope, 91
Hercules, Death of, tragedy by Orlando, 65

Isham, Mr., 58

James the First, King, 24, 47, 69

Johnson, Samuel, 154
Jonson, Ben, 62

Kew Gardens, 203

Keynes, Mrs. J. M. (see Lopokova, Madame)

Leicester Square, 150

Lock, Rape of the, 145
Lopokova, Madame, 217
Louise, 208

M., Mr., 135, 169

Marlowe, 61, 62
Marshall & Snelgrove’s, 207
Mary, Queen of Scots, 122
Melbourne, Lord, 166
Moray, the Earl of, 27

Nell, 151
Nelson, 226

Oak Tree, The, 54, 189, 192, 195, 215, 224

Orlando, appearance as a boy, 12; writes his rst play, 13; visits
Queen at Whitehall, 18; made Treasurer and Steward, 18; his
loves, 19; and Russian Princess, 26–46; his rst trance, 47;
retires into solitude, 49; love of reading, 52; his romantic
dramas, literary ambitions, 54, 57, 58, 70, 71, 72; and Greene,
59, 63, 65; his great-grandmother Moll, 60; buys elk-hounds, 66;
and his poem The Oak Tree, 67, 77, 102, 122, 163; and his
house, 73–6; and the Archduchess Harriet, 77–81; Ambassador at
Constantinople, 82–99; created a Duke, 90; second trance, 94;
marriage to Rosina Pepita, a gipsy, 94; becomes a woman, 97;
with the gipsies, 99–107; returns to England, 108; lawsuits, 119;
and Archduke Harry, 126; in London society, 133; entertains the
wits, 144; and Mr. Pope, 148; and Nell, 151; confused with her
cousin, 153; returns to her country house, 161; breaks her ankle,
170; declared a woman, 176; engagement, 174; marriage, 181;
birth of her rst son, 204
Othello, 41

Palmerston, Lord, 187

Pippin, the spaniel, 136
Pope, Alexander, 119, 138, 141, 142, 147, 149, 219
Princess, the Russian, 27–30, 36, 39, 55, 116, 124, 209

R., Countess of, 138, 139

R., Lady, 141, 191
Railway, the, 190
Robinson, Grace, 50
Rossetti, Miss Christina, 201
Rustum el Sadi, 102, 104, 124, 226

St. Paul’s, 38, 39

Salisbury, Lady, 134
Scrope, Sir Adrian, 90, 92, 93
Shakespeare, William, 16, 56, 215
Shelmerdine, Marmaduke Bonthrop, 174, 227, 228
Smiles, 198
Spectator, the, 146
Spenser, 197
Stewkley, Mrs., 16, 50
Stubbs, Joe, 220
Su olk, Lady, 134
Swift, Jonathan, 219

Tavistock, Lady, 134

Tennyson, the late Lord, 144, 193
Tupper, 198
Tyrconnel, the Lady Margaret, 29

Vere, Lord Francis, 27

Victoria, Queen, 163, 166, 177

Williams, Mrs., 154

Wren, Christopher, 149

THE END
 Notes

GENERAL NOTE

Orlando is a roman à clef, written to entertain and also perhaps to

comfort Vita Sackville-West. It is full of knowing detail about Knole,
the Sackvilles’ ancestral home near Sevenoaks where Vita had
grown up and from which she was nally exiled when her father
died in January 1928, during the writing of Orlando. Part of Woolf’s
intention was the re-creation, within the novel, of the home that
Vita had lost, and much of the information she used was drawn
from Vita’s account of it in Knole. But Woolf had also visited Knole,
and had listened attentively to Vita talking about her love for it. For
that reason, these notes also draw on Vita’s expanded fourth edition
of Knole (1958) as well as on Charles J. Phillips’s two-volume
History of the Sackville Family (1930) (hereafter, Phillips) which also
provides a catalogue raisonné of the paintings and drawings in the
house at that time. In writing Orlando, Virginia accepted Vita’s view
of the Sackvilles that ‘their inter est lay in their being so
representative. From generation to generation they might stand,
fully equipped, as portraits from English history’ (Knole, p. 28).
In what follows, further material has been taken from Woolf’s own
Letters and Diary, from Victoria Glendinning’s biography, Vita
(1983), and from the Letters of Vita. On the MS, see ‘Orlando: An
Edition of the Manuscript’ (ed. Madeline Moore, Twentieth Century
Literature, 25, 1979, PP. 303–55). Much the most important single
source of information has been Nigel Nicolson, who annotated a
volume of Orlando for our text editor, Brenda Lyons, especially for
this edition; we would like to thank him particularly warmly for all
his help. In addition, Sandra Gilbert would like to express her deep
gratitude to Susan Fox for invaluable research assistance.

PREFACE

The list of contributors in the preface, which includes many of

Woolf’s favourite authors, as well as her friends, is part of the joke
begun when she subtitled Orlando, ‘A Biography’ (see Letters, III, pp.
493, 547, 554, where she asks her nephew Quentin Bell, Hugh
Walpole and Charles Sanger for permission to use their names here).

CHAPTER I

1. a Moor: a North African. It is di cult to know in what context

Orlando’s actual ancestors would have fought against Moors in
North Africa, though his literary ancestor, Charlemagne’s
knight, Roland or Orlando, the hero of Ariosto’s epic poem
Orlando Furioso (1532), had fought against them and been
driven mad by love (see the introduction, p. xxv). According to
the MS, the novel’s action begins in 1553 when Thomas
Sackville, like Orlando, would have been sixteen; the time
sequence quickly moves on to the end of Elizabeth’s reign
(which began in 1558).
2. elds of asphodel: where the immortals or the happy dead live.
The asphodel is a lily-like ower – Vita had found it growing
 wild in Persia on her visit in 1926 (Vita, p. 157).
3. northern mists… coronets on their heads: ‘The Sackvilles are
supposed to have gone into Normandy in the ninth century with
Rollo the Dane’ (Knole, p. 29).
4. an heraldic leopard: mentioned as decorating the Tudor gables
(Knole, pp. 2, 3).
5. the shapely legs, the handsome body: what follows, according to
Nicolson, is a recognizable description of Vita Sackville-West,
even down to the detail that she ‘was a tri e clumsy’ (p. 13).
Woolf, like the book’s narrator, wrote admiringly of Vita’s legs
(e.g. to Jacques Raverat, 26 December 1924, as ‘her real claim
to consideration’, Letters, III, p. 150; or in her diary a year later,
Diary, III, 21 December 1925, p. 52).
6. Aethelbert: A Tragedy in Five Acts: like Orlando, Thomas
Sackville, rst Earl of Dorset, wrote a ve-act tragedy inspired
by early English history, Gorboduc, performed in 1561 (Knole,
pp. 33, 41).
7. Stubbs, the gardener: Stubbs was the name of the head gardener
at Knole when Woolf was writing (Nicolson).
8. the house was a town: Woolf exaggerates Vita’s descriptions of
Knole as ‘a medieval village’, ‘a jumbled village’, just as below
(p. 16) where Knole’s four acres become ve (Knole, pp. 1, 18).
9. a place crowned by a single oak tree: Vita often wrote under an
oak in Knole park, on a high mound known as the Mast Head
(Nicolson). The oak tree, traditionally associated with English
 kings, later provides the title for Orlando’s major poem, his
equivalent of Vita’s prize-winning poem The Land. Its title
suggests the value of roots, family and Englishness.
10. Sometimes one could see the English Channel… London… Snowdon:
none of these places can actually be seen from Knole, but this
panoramic sweep (echoed in the novel’s time scheme) seems to
have been part of her plan for the book from its rst conception:
‘Suddenly between twelve & one I conceived a whole fantasy to
be called “The Jessamy Brides”… Two women, poor, solitary at
the top of a house — one can see anything (for this is all
fantasy) the Tower Bridge, clouds, aeroplanes… The Ladies are
to have Con stantinople in view. Dreams of golden domes…’
(Diary, III, 14 March 1927, p. 131).
11. Mrs. Stewkley’s sitting-room… hodden brown: a ‘Mrs Stewkly’ is
named as ‘At the parlour table’ in a list of Knole household
servants from 1613 (Knole, p. 78); hodden is a coarse woollen
cloth; the unidenti ed writer is William Shakespeare, whose
portrait was in the Poets’ Parlour at Knole. Vita later wrote, ‘I
often entertained wild dreams that some light might be thrown
on the Shakespeare problem by a discovery of letters or
documents at Knole’ (Knole, 4th edn, 1958, p. 57).
Woolf had associated Shakespeare at work with the mystery
of creativity in her short story ‘The Mark on the Wall’: ‘A man
who sat himself solidly in an arm-chair, and looked into the
re, so – A shower of ideas fell perpetually from some very high
 Heaven down through his mind. He leant his forehead on his
hand, and people, looking in through the open door…’ (Shorter
Fiction, p. 85.)
12. the great Queen herself: Queen Elizabeth gave Knole to Thomas
Sackville in 1566, and visited the house on a royal progress in
1573. There was a portrait of her in the Brown Gallery (Phillips,
I, p. 190; II, p. 423). Woolf’s portrayal of Queen Elizabeth was
partly in spired by her waxwork e gy, then at Westminster
Abbey, of which she wrote a description soon after completing
Orlando: ‘Her eyes are wide and vigilant; her nose thin as the
beak of a hawk; her lips shut tight; her eyebrows arched; only
the jowl gives the nedrawn face its massiveness’ (New Republic,
11 April 1928; reprinted in ‘The Fleeting Portrait’, CE, IV, p.
205). Woolf’s friend Lytton Strachey drew a comparable portrait
of the ageing queen in his Elizabeth and Essex (published
December 1928), but Woolf did not apparently read it until after
the publication of Orlando in October (see Diary, III, 25
November 1928, p. 208).
13. she heard the guns in the Channel: Vita had told Virginia of
hearing the guns in France from Knole during the First World
War (Nicolson). Woolf had herself heard them on the downs at
Asheham in 1916 (see ‘Heard on the Downs’, Essays, II, pp. 40–
42).
14. the great monastic house: Knole had passed from Archbishop
Bourchier and Cardinal Morton to Henry VIII, and thence to
 Queen Elizabeth who gave it to Thomas Sackville. Although the
unnamed house in Orlando is said to have been given to
Orlando’s father, Orlando himself is also identi ed with Thomas
Sackville, both as a poet and playwright (Sackville had written
Gorboduc and the moralistic poem A Mirror for Magistrates), as
the Queen’s ‘young cousin’, and in receiving various honours
from her. Like Sackville, Orlando be comes Lord Treasurer and
Lord High Steward, is dubbed Knight of the Garter (see p. 18),
and is sent to Scotland ‘on a sad embassy to the unhappy Queen’
(p. 18), i.e. to warn Mary Queen of Scots of her impending
execution (Knole, pp. 34–5).
15. booming at the Tower: i.e. at the Tower of London, to celebrate
the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588.
16. Richmond: Queen Eli2abeth lived at Richmond Palace, to the
south-west of London, dying there in 1603. She was succeeded
by James I.
17. Doris, Chloris, Delia, or Diana: these might be typical names of
mistresses in love poems: the Elizabethan poet Samuel Daniel
wrote a sonnet sequence to Delia; while the Restoration poet
Charles Sackville, sixth Earl (1638–1706), ‘left us gay and
arti cial stanzas to Chloris and Dorinda’ (Knole, p. 115).
18. Wapping Old Stairs: in east London, near the Tower and running
down to the docks. Woolf’s fascination with Elizabethan voyages
is evident in what follows: the Spanish main was the north-east
coast of South America, from Panama to the Orinoco River; the
 Azores are islands o the coast of Portugal, where in 1591, the
explorer Sir Richard Grenville’s ship Revenge was sunk as he
fought against the Spanish. (Her essay on Hakluyt’s Voyages,
‘Tra cks and Discoveries’, is reprinted in Essays, II, pp. 329–
36.)
19. Earl of Cumberland: ‘a picturesque gure. He was Elizabeth’s
o cial champion at all jousts and tilting, a nobleman of great
splendour… [he had] the love of adventure which carried him
eleven times to sea, to the Indies and elsewhere’ (Knole, pp. 48–
9). He was the father-in-law of Richard Sackville, third Earl of
Dorset, and there was a portrait of him in the Brown Gallery
(Phillips, p. 423). The reference to Cumberland building
almshouses in the Sheen Road later in this paragraph looks like
a private joke. On 27 August 1932, Woolf dictated the following
response to an inquiry on this topic:
[Mrs Woolf] cannot recollect that she had any authority for
saying that Lord Cumberland founded almshouses; she
thinks it probable that having some recollection of old
almshouses in that neighbourhood, she fathered them upon
Lord Cumberland on the spur of the moment.
These early nineteenth century almshouses stood just around
the corner from Hogarth House, Richmond, where the Woolfs
lived from 1915–24. There is a further reference to them near
the end of the novel (p. 208).
20. Clorinda, Favilla, Euphrosyne: Nigel Nicolson identi es Clorinda
with Rosamund Grosvenor, Vita’s rst, and at one time best-
loved, friend (Vita, pp. 23–4, 48). Euphrosyne (‘joy’) was one of
the three classical Graces (Woolf had used the name for the boat
in her rst novel, The Voyage Out, 1915). As ‘one of the Irish
Desmonds’, she may recall the portrait in the Leicester Gallery
of Catherine Fitzger ald, Countess of Desmond (Knole, p. 14).
21. The Great Frost: occurred in January 1608. Woolf knew of it
from Thomas Dekker’s pamphlet ‘The Great Frost/Cold Doings
in London, except it be at the Lottery’, reprinted anonymously
in Edward Arber’s An English Garner (I, 1877, pp. 77–99). Some
details are taken from his pamphlet, e.g. ‘the high mortality
among sheep and cattle’, but Woolfs account is more fantastic,
so that the rocks of the Peak District (‘some parts of Derbyshire’)
are attributed to ‘a kind of petri cation’. Dekker described how
the Thames became ‘a very pavement of glass’, and the citizens
played games and sold food and drink on the frozen river; he
also described the plight of a man trapped on an ice oe as the
result of the sudden thaw with which the frost ended. Woolf had
a letter from Vita of 31 January 1927 describing Moscow and
‘all the tra c passing to and fro across the frozen river as
though it were a road; and sleighs every where…’(Letters of Vita,
p. 183.)
22. the north-west passage…Armada: Elizabethan explorers had
hoped to nd a sea route to the Far East by sailing around the
 north coast of America. The Spanish Armada was the eet sent
by Philip II against Elizabeth in 1588 (see Note 15, above).
23. London Bridge: built at the narrowest point of the river, the old
bridge carried shops and houses on it, and the ice would have
been deepest here. The Surrey side is the south side of the river.
24. corantoe and lavolta: Renaissance dances, the rst characterized
by quick running steps (‘courante’), the second a dance for a
couple, involving high leaps.
25. Princess Marousha Romanovitch: later referred to as Sasha, this
charac ter may partly have been suggested by ‘La Muscovite’,
whose pastel portrait hangs in the sitting-room at Knole and
who is addressed in Charles Sackville’s poem ‘Arno’s Vale’
(Knole, p. 173); but Woolf’s main inspiration was Vita’s great
love, Violet Trefusis. On 13 October 1927 Virginia wrote to
Vita: ‘Tomorrow I begin the chapter which describes Violet and
you meeting on the ice… Do give me some inkling what sort of
quarrels you had. Also, for what particular quality did she rst
choose you?’ The same letter links Vita (rather than Violet) with
emeralds, however: ‘I want to see you in the lamplight, in your
emeralds’ (Letters, III, p. 430).
26. Je crois avoir fait… la sienne: Sasha’s French here was supplied
by Vita who, like Orlando, was bilingual in French and English.
She was apparently translating Woolf’s phrases, ‘I think I met a
gentle man of your family in Poland last summer’, and ‘The
ladies of the English Court ravish me with their beauty. Never
 have I seen so graceful a lady as your Queen or so ne a head
dress as she wears.’ Vita also supplied the translation of ‘rigged
up like a Maypole’ (see p. 28), as well as a number of other
phrases that Woolf did not nally use (Letters of Vita, 26 April
1928, p. 284).
27. George Villiers: (1592–1628) was King James’s favourite, later
made Duke of Buckingham.
28. the Tower… Royal Exchange: the Yeomen of the Guard, known as
‘Beefeaters’, guard the Tower and wear a distinctive red Tudor
uniform. The Temple Bar, the gate between Westminster and the
old City of London, was topped with iron spikes, on which the
heads of executed rebels were displayed. The Royal Exchange
was built as a money market in 1564, on the corner of
Threadneedle Street in the City.
29. a white Russian fox: Nigel Nicolson suggests that this refers to
the Russian bear-cub given to Vita by Ivan Hay when she was
nineteen; it had to be put down (Vita, p. 41). Orlando had
earlier compared Sasha to ‘a fox in the snow’ (p. 26). Virginia
later described Violet Trefusis (whom she did not meet until
1932) as ‘like a fox cub, all scent and seduction’ (19 January
1941, Letters, VI, p. 462).
30. the arras… at home: Vita wrote of the Leicester Gallery that ‘the
tapestry sways, and the gures on it undulate and seem to come
alive (Knole, pp. 14–16); but Nicolson identi es this with the
tapestry in the Venetian Ambassador’s room.
31. the philosopher is right: Robert Burton takes this view in his
Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), but as an Anglican he would
have disapproved of the Anabaptists, a radical sect who aroused
great fear since they did not believe in the sacraments
(including baptism) and were permitted to conform outwardly.
32. palanquin: a canopy.
33. sennight: in seven days’ time (archaic).
34. the cross of St. Paul’s: a deliberate anachronism – old St Paul’s
had a square tower that was burnt down in the re of London of
1666. It was rebuilt with a dome and cross by Christopher Wren
(see also pp. 38, 117 and 157).
35. stags… bucket: this happened at Knole once according to
Nicolson. Vita described a stag wandering into the banqueting-
hall on one occasion during the summer when the doors were
left open (Knole, p. 4).
36. cony catchers: Elizabethan slang for ‘con dence tricksters’
(literally, rabbit catchers).
37. Punch and Judy show: a traditional children’s show performed
with glove-puppets in a small booth, in which Punch rst beats,
then kills, his wife Judy. Orlando is watching a street
performance of Shakespeare’s Othello (as the index reference
shows).
38. Methinks … should yawn: Othello, V. ii. 99–101; perhaps with an
allusion to the total eclipse of the sun on 29 June 1927 which
the Woolfs and Vita and Harold Nicolson travelled up to
 Richmond in North Yorkshire to see (30 June 1927, Diary, III,
pp. 142–4), and which she also wrote of in ‘The Sun and the
Fish’ (CE, IV, pp. 178–83).
39. Jour de ma vie!: ‘Day of my life’, the Sackville family motto,
derived from the Battle of Crécy (1346) where one of the family
had fought (Nicolson).
40. Drake, Hawkins, and Grenville: heroes of Elizabeth’s naval wars
against the Spanish.
41. the Irish rebels: the English government under Elizabeth and
James made a series of attempts to colonize Ireland. Lands in
Donegal and Tyrone had been declared forfeit in December
1607, and later in 1608 a further rebellion broke out. In the MS,
the old nobleman is exceptional among those dying in the ood;
for the rest, ‘Nobody of very high birth seemed to be included
… as if the thaw had been the work of these rebels… which
seemed to show that the upper sort had received warning &
made for safety.’
42. standing out to sea: sailing out to sea.

CHAPTER II

1. The biographer… truth: at much the same time as Woolf began

writing Orlando she completed an essay on ‘The New Biography’
(CE, IV, pp. 229–35), in part a review of Harold Nicolson’s Some
People. It opens with a quotation from Sir Sidney Lee: ‘The aim
of biography is the truthful transmission of personality.’ Woolf
goes on to argue that truth and personality are opposed, and
 that though truth is required in a biography it does not combine
easily or comfortably with ction or with the depiction of inner
life. Themes from this essay are taken up again on p. 55.
2. of what nature life?: Orlando’s seven-day sleep, a gure for
oblivion or death, prepares us for his Jacobean preoccupation
with ‘the skull beneath the skin’, on display in this chapter, as
well as for other unexpected developments.
3. Mrs. Grimsditch: all the names listed here are taken from the
third Lord Dorset’s catalogue of his household between 1613
and 1624 (Knole, pp. 78–81). At the parlour table are listed
(among others), Mrs Field, Mrs Grimsditch, Mrs Stewkly, Mr
Dupper, Chaplain; in the Nursery, Nurse Carpenter; at the
Laundry Maids’ Table, Mrs Judith Simpton, Faith Husband and
Grace Robinson, a Blacka moor.
4. the crypt where his ancestors lay: the crypt of Orlando’s ancestors
lies beneath the house, symbolizing an awareness of death
below or behind all human existence and prompting Orlando to
a Hamletlike soliloquy over the old bones. The Sackville family
vault is not actually at Knole but at Withyham parish church.
The Jacobean diarist Anne Cli ord recorded visiting ‘my Lord
Treasurer’s tomb’ there and returning in tears. Vita added, ‘I
have been down into that vault myself, and it is not a cheerful
expedition. In a small, dark cave underground, beneath the
church, among grey veils of cobwebs, the co ns of the
Sackvilles are stacked on shelves…’ (Knole, p. 71.)
5. Thomas Browne: (1605–82), a Norwich doctor famous for his elo
quent Latinate prose (cf. ‘the delicate articulation of one of the
doctor’s longest and most marvellously contorted cogitations’, p.
52). Hydriotaphia, or Urn Burial (1658) is a meditation on death,
time and eternity. According to Knole (p. 105), Richard
Sackville, third Earl of Dorset, recommended Browne’s Religio
Medici to Sir Kenelm Digby when the latter was imprisoned
during the Civil War. Digby was so impressed with the book
that he sent back a long letter of his Observations on it to Lord
Dorset. Woolf had always admired Browne’s prose (see Essays,
III, pp. 153–9, 368–71).
6. asphodel: see Chapter I, Note 2.
7. every gift… beaten gold: the four acres have now become nine;
this catalogue of Orlando’s possessions suggests the 1624
household inventory (see Knole, pp. 95–6; and Note 35, below).
8. a great inlaid cabinet… cedar wood: this cabinet belonged to Vita,
and was where she kept all her most intimate letters. It may be
what Virginia had in mind when she asked Vita, ‘Will this letter
go into the cupboard?’ (30 October 1927, Letters, III, p. 434).
Orlando’s proli c writings parallel those of Vita, both as a child
and a young woman (Vita, pp. 25–6, 33). The play printed by
John Ball suggests Vita’s Chatterton, privately printed at
Sevenoaks in 1909 (Nicolson). Orlando’s poem ‘The Oak Tree’,
whose writing extends throughout the book, corresponds to
Vita’s long poem The Land (see Chapter I, Note 9).
 9. of rainbow and granite: this passage closely echoes Woolf’s essay
‘The New Biography’ (see above, Chapter II, Note i) in its
distinction between ‘truth as something of granite-like solidity
and personality as something of rainbow-like intangibility’. The
essay ends with a reference to Harold Nicolson’s ‘mixture of
biography and autobio graphy, of fact and ction, of Lord
Curzon’s trousers and Miss Plimsoll’s nose…’ The ‘even now (the
rst of November, 1927)’ is likely to have been the actual date
of composition since, according to the MS, she began Chapter II
on 29 October. Orlando was begun on 8 October 1927 and
completed on 17 March 1928 (see Diary, III, pp. 161, 176;
Letters, III, pp. 428, 474).
10. This is the face… Twitchett’s room: the face is Shakespeare’s (see
Chapter I, Note II). Twitchett is Orlando’s mother’s waiting maid
(see p. 12).
11. how di cult it is for a nobleman to he a writer: in Knole (p. 32)
Vita quoted Edmund Gosse to the e ect that Thomas Sackville
was ‘a born poet… diverted from poetry by the pursuits of
statesman ship’, and thus ‘a very good instance of the
disadvantage of ne birth to a poet’. Woolf told Vita’s cousin
Edward Sackville-West, ‘How no aristocrat can write a book’
(Letter to Vita, 17 February 1926, Letters, III, p. 241), and in a
slightly later essay, ‘The Niece of an Earl’, made the related
point that ‘It is from the middle class that writers spring’ (CE, I,
p. 222).
12. shawms… had burst in: Woolf may be thinking of the classical
myth, according to which the head of the poet Orpheus was torn
from his shoulders by a ‘horrid rout’ of frenzied women, perhaps
with a distant echo of Milton’s Lycidas, where love is also a
threat to poetic achievement. Shawms are antique wind
instruments.
13. Sir Boris… the Spaniard: Woolf here echoes the ‘long
monotonous list of Sir Jordans, Sir Andrews, Sir Edwards, Sir
Richards’ (Knole, p. 30).
14. the vales of Tempe: in Greece, close to Mount Olympus, and
praised for their beauty in classical poetry.
15. Giles Isham of Norfolk: Sir Gyles Isham (1903–76) was Woolf’s
second cousin, son of her cousin Millicent (nee Halford
Vaughan). On going down from Oxford in 1926, he became a
Shakespearean actor.
16. the glories of blood and state: the opening lines of James Shirley’s
best-known poem, from his play The Contention of Ajax and
Ulysses (1659):

The glories of our blood and state

Are shadows, not substantial things.

17. Lady Winchilsea’s fan: Ann Finch, Countess of Winchilsea (1661–

1720), wrote poems, some of which Woolf discusses in Chapter
IV of A Room of One’s Own (1928; Penguin Books, 1945). This
phrase echoes the title of Wilde’s play, Lady Windermere’s Fan
(1892).
18. Nicholas Greene of Cli ord’s Inn: an imaginary writer, supposed
to live in a small court o Fleet Street (where Virginia and
Leonard had lived in the year following their marriage). Greene
is partly based on the Elizabethan hack writer, pamphleteer,
poet and play wright, Robert Greene (1558–92), notorious for
his envy of Shake speare, whom he denounced as ‘an upstart
crow, beauti ed with our feathers’. He later reappeared in
Chapter III of A Room of One’s Own as the seducer of
Shakespeare’s (imaginary) sister Judith: ‘at last Nick Greene the
actor-manager took pity on her; she found herself with child by
that gentleman and so… killed herself one winter’s night…’
19. Flodden…Agincourt: the English defeated the Scots at the Battle
of Flodden (1513), and had defeated the French at Agincourt a
century earlier (1415).
20. Malmsey: a sweet Madeira wine.
21. Shakespeare… Donne: Orlando’s heroes are the major dramatists
and poets of his day. John Donne, the love poet and Dean of St
Paul’s, according to Izaac Walton, sometimes preached in the
Chapel at Knole, and left Lord Dorset several pictures in his will
(Knole, 4th edn, 1958, pp. 32, 69). The dramatist Ben Jonson
had his portrait in the Poets’ Parlour and is said to have enjoyed
the patronage of Richard Sackville, third Earl of Dorset (1589–
1624) (Knole, p. 59). For Browne, see above, Note 5.
22. La Gloire: glory.
23. Cock Tavern in Fleet Street: setting for a scandalous scene in
which Charles Sackville, sixth Earl of Dorset, was involved
(Knole, p. 117). Leonard and Virginia used to dine there when
they lived round the corner at Cli ord’s Inn.
24. Cicero: Roman statesman (106–43 BC) whose prose style was
much admired and imitated during the Renaissance.
25. three hundred years ago: in the MS, a passage follows insisting
that Greene’s ‘impure’ sayings have had to be suppressed in the
interests of Modesty (who appears again in the masque in
Chapter III), even though Greene had a letter from Shakespeare
relating the true story of Mr W.H. and the dark lady, which he
‘gave to Orlando as a pleasant curiosity and a keepsake’, but
which had to be burnt. The MS adds, ‘No one of British blood
will censure us for the course we took.’
26. a teg from a ewe: a two-year-old (male) sheep from a female.
27. the nest elk-hounds: Vita kept elk-hounds (she inherited Canute
from her father – see p. 169); one hound did have puppies
under the dinner table at Long Barn, where Vita was then living
(Nicolson). Like Vita, Orlando turned to dogs and gardening for
consolation.
28. Time passed: Woolf here mocks the middle section, ‘Time
Passes’, of her previous novel, To the Lighthouse (1927). The
meditation on time that follows gives light-hearted expression to
a serious artistic problem for the novelist.
29. deserts of vast eternity: from Andrew Marvell’s ‘To his Coy
Mistress’, itself a meditation on the nature of time:

But at my back I always hear

Time’s winged chariot hurrying near.
And Yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.

30. eets: glides away, vanishes.

31. budget: the contents of a bag or bundle.
32. scrolloping: a word invented by Woolf to denote a rambling,
looped and decorated movement (see also p. 159).
33. There it lay… spring: Vita loved this paragraph and quoted the
nal sentence from it in an appendix to the fourth edition of
Knole (1958, p. 215). Writing immediately to Virginia to thank
her for the novel, she added a postscript: ‘You made me cry with
your passages about Knole, you wretch’ (11 October 1928,
Letters of Vita, p. 306).
34. King Jamie, my Lord: the King’s Bedroom at Knole was said to
have been furnished for the reception of James I. During the
Restoration, Charles Sackville, sixth Earl of Dorset, had it
provided with ‘a set of furniture made entirely in silver: table,
hanging mirror, and tripods’. Like Orlando, he ‘cannot have
known when he had had enough of a good thing’ (Knole, p. 15).
James I’s son, Charles I, had been executed in 1649, and Oliver
Cromwell, on behalf of Parlia ment, ruled England during the
interregnum. Charles II came to the throne in 1660. The
 Sackville family had been committed royal ists (see Knole, pp.
97, 106, 107, 110). 35. Three hundred and sixty- ve bedrooms:
according to Knole (p. 4) there were 7 courts, 52 staircases and
365 rooms (not bedrooms) in the house, to correspond to the
divisions of days and weeks in the year. The inventory that
follows, though much exaggerated, is inspired by one of 1624
(Knole, pp. 95–6).
35. Three hundred and sixty- ve bedrooms: according to Knole (p. 4)
there were 7 courts, 52 staircases and 365 rooms (not
bedrooms) in the house, to correspond to the divisions of days
and weeks in the year. The inventory that follows, though much
exaggerated, is inspired by one of 1624 (Knole, pp. 95—6).
36. great trees… ooring: the oor of the Cartoon Gallery at Knole is
formed of ‘solid tree trunks, split in half, with the rounded half
downwards’ (Knole, p. 10).
37. galleries… mermaids on their backs: in classical legend Daphne
ed from Apollo and was transformed into a laurel. There was a
blue and green tapestry that constantly stirred in the breeze in
the Venetian Ambassador’s bedroom, a room lovingly described
by Vita in Knole; the carved chairs in the Brown Gallery were
‘for ever holding out their arms, for ever disappointed’, and in
the ballroom there was a frieze of mermaids and dolphins that
Vita had loved as a child (Knole, pp. 15–16, 13, 11). Early
editions of Knole and Charles Phillips’s history describe the
tapestries in the Venetian Ambassa dor’s bedroom variously as
medieval or classical in theme – Apollo and Diana or Ulysses
 and Circe perhaps – but a guidebook to Knole written by Vita
for the National Trust in 1948 says that they depict scenes from
Orlando Furioso (see Chapter I, Note I).
38. round schoolboy hand: like Vita’s (Nicolson); for ‘The Oak Tree’,
see Chapter I, Note 9.
39. the Archduchess Harriet: based on Lord Henry (Harry) Lascelles,
who pursued and proposed to Vita in 1912 (Vita, pp. 48–51);
later, in 1922, he married the Princess Royal. Virginia asked
Vita, ‘What used you and Lord Lascelles to talk about’ (23
October 1927). Vita replied, ‘He was always very tongue-tied, so
we didn’t get very far. He had nice hands’ (25 October 1927,
Letters of Vita, pp. 255–6). Scand-op-Boom may have been
suggested by Bergen-op-Zoom, where Edward Sackville, fourth
Earl of Dorset, had fought a duel (Knole, p. 184).
40. Jacobi or of Topp: ‘This suit [of tilting armour], which is one of
the gems of the Wallace Collection, had been made in 1575 by
Jacob Topp or Jacobi for Sir Thomas Sackville’ (Knole, p. 99).
41. King Charles… Nell Guyn was on his arm: Nell Gwyn (1650–87)
was an actress, the mistress of Charles II and also of Charles
Sackville, sixth Earl of Dorset; a portrait in the Spangle dressing-
room was supposed to be of Nell (Knole, pp. 122, 124–6; Phillips,
II, p. 428). Sackvilles traditionally served as ambassadors,
though mainly in France or the Netherlands. Vita’s husband
Harold Nicolson served in the British Embassy at Constantinople
 from 1911–14, and she began married life there in November
1913 (Nicolson; and Vita, p. 69).

CHAPTER III

1. his Bath… Dukedom: Orlando is now made a Knight of the Order

of the Bath, and promoted from Earl to Duke, apparently as a
reward for his services as ambassador in Constantinople. His
hon ours parallel those of Lionel Sackville, seventh Earl, who
was made Knight of the Garter in 1714 (Orlando already held
this honour – see p. 18) and Duke of Dorset in 1720.
2. the revolution… the re: these occur in Constantinople during Or
lando’s service there, although they also recapitulate the
revolution of 1652 and the Great Fire of 1666, perhaps half a
century earlier, in England.
3. cheroot: a cigar cut at both ends. Nicolson observes that Virginia
smoked them, and often tried unsuccessfully to persuade Vita to
do so too.
4. the domes of Santa So a: Constantinople had been an element in
the novel from its rst conception (see above, Chapter I, Note
10). In addition to its signi cance for Vita, Woolf had visited it
in October 1906 with her brother Adrian, her sister and Violet
Dick inson, recording, ‘the morning veil of mist, & the stately
domes that shine through’ and the great cathedral of Santa So a
‘like a treble globe of bubbles frozen solid’ (A Passionate
Apprentice, PP. 357, 347). The hills of Pera lie on the further
 (Turkish) side of the Golden Horn, and the Galata Tower stands
on its heights.
5. journeys there alone on foot: Nicolson points out that this passage
suggests Vita’s journey over the Persian mountains. Early in
1927 Vita went out to Tehran to join Harold, and they made a
walking expedition into the Bakhtiari mountains, described in
letters to Virginia, and later in her travel book Twelve Days
(1927). The gypsies (whom Orlando joins later in this chapter)
in some respects resemble the Bakhtiari tribe that Vita met
there.
6. Circassian: ‘from the region of the Caucasus mountains between
the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea.
7. Janissaries: the soldiers belonging to the Sultan’s Guard.
8. hookah: a water pipe. Orlando’s boredom with diplomatic cere
monial re ects Vita’s as described in letters to Virginia from
Tehran early in 1927: ‘Correctness is the order of the day, so we
never get any further’ (19 February); ‘We’ve had a series of
dinner parties, thank you, one of them indistinguishable from
the other’ (4 March, Letters of Vita, pp. 192, 202).
9. Ramadan: ninth month of the Islamic year, observed by fasting
during daylight hours.
10. the diary of John Fenner Brigge: Woolf uses this occasion to
parody eighteenth-century diaries and letters. In the MS, some
of the gaps in Brigge’s letter are lled in slightly di erently so
that the ‘tableau vivant’ (p. 91) ‘represented the masque of
 Comus by our… English poet Milton’. Among those performing
are ‘the bearers of some of our greatest names in England, such
as Howard, Stanley, Herbert, Sackville, Talbot…’ (at which
point the branch breaks). The masque anticipates that attendant
on Orlando’s sex change, while the names of great English
families occur to Orlando later in the chapter (see below, Note
22).
11. blue-jackets: sailors of the Royal Navy.
12. Rosina Pepita: Vita’s maternal grandmother was Josefa de Oliva,
a famous Spanish dancer better known as ‘Pepita’. She lived
with Lionel Sackville-West, second Lord Sackville, and bore him
ve children of whom the youngest, Victoria, was Vita’s mother.
In 1910, Victoria’s older brother Henry brought a lawsuit
against Vita’s father (who was also his cousin, and the
legitimate son of Lionel’s younger brother) on the grounds that
Lionel and Pepita had in fact been married, and he was thus
heir to Knole (see Chapter V, Note 27; and Vita, pp. 2, 30).
13. bastinado: punishment by caning, especially on the soles of the
feet.
14. red boxes: used for o cial documents.
15. three gures enter: Orlando’s second seven-day sleep recalls the
earlier one, at the outset of Chapter II; a masque of three sisters
now intervenes, attempting to prevent her ‘indecent’ discovery
of the change in her body. They are dismissed by Truth to the
 ‘still unravished heights of [suburban] Surrey’, protected by
concealing ivy and curtains.
16. let other pens… sexuality: Chapter XLVIII of Jane Austen’s Mans
eld Park begins, ‘Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery. I
quit such odious subjects as soon as I can, impatient to restore
everybody … to tolerable comfort.’
17. her Seleuchi hound: when Vita was staying with Gertrude Bell in
Baghdad in February 1926 she bought a Seleuchi puppy, to take
to Tehran, as a present for Harold (Vita, p. 156).
18. Broussa: modern Bursa, old capital of the Ottoman empire, is on
the hills above the sea of Marmara in north-west Turkey.
Virginia had travelled out there in 1911 when her sister
Vanessa, on holiday there with her husband Clive Bell and
Roger Fry, was suddenly taken ill. Orlando’s gypsy guide from
Constantinople, Rustum, is named after one of the heroes in
Firdawsi’s great Persian epic, the Shâh-nâma (or Book of the
Kings).
19. Thessalian: hills in northern Greece, west of Bursa and across the
sea.
20. Marmara… Parthenon: from the mountains behind Bursa it may
be possible to glimpse Greece across the sea of Marmara, but it
would not be possible to see Athens, crowned with the Acropolis
on which stands the Parthenon, the temple of the maidens.
Woolf had visited Athens in 1906, on her travels to
 Constantinople. On the sense of the panoramic, see Chapter I,
Note 10.
21. withys: thin branches, usually of willow, used in basket-making.
22. Howards and Plantagenets: old English families, the Plantagenets
were royal, the Howards merely aristocratic, as were the Talbots
(see above, Note 10, and p. 105).
23. Mount Athos: a monastery in north-east Greece, from the
vicinity of which women and female animals are strictly
forbidden.
24. burnous: hooded cloak worn by Arabs.
25. heavy carts… tree trunks: Orlando’s vision of her home under
snow recalls Virginia’s rst visit to Knole in January 1927:
… cart bringing wood in to be sawn by the great circular
saw. How do you see that? I asked Vita. She said she saw it
as something that had gone on for hundreds of years. They
had brought wood in from the Park to replenish the great
res like this for centuries: & her ancestresses had walked so
on the snow with their great dogs bounding by them. All the
centuries seemed lit up, the past expressive, articulate; not
dumb & forgotten…
                                                 (23 January 1927, Diary, III,
p. 125.)

CHAPTER IV
1. paduasoy: strong corded silk, much worn in the eighteenth
century.
2. shiver: a tiny piece, a shaving (echoing Orlando’s ‘delicious
tremor’).
3. pkasaunce: a pleasure ground.
4. like a Guy Fawkes: the e gy of Guy Fawkes (who conspired
against James I) is burnt on 5 November, i.e. ‘grotesquely or
absurdly dressed’.
5. samphire gatherers: samphire is a kind of edible seaweed. This
sen tence echoes Edgar’s account of Dover cli s in King Lear (IV.
vi. 14–15):

Half way down

Hangs one that gathers samphire,
dreadful trade!

The phrase ‘mopping and mowing’ (i.e. making faces) is also

used by Edgar who, disguised as mad Tom, refers to the demon
‘Flibbertigibbit, of mopping and mowing’ (IV. i. 61–2). Lionel,
rst Duke of Dorset, appears in a view of Dover Castle by John
Wootton (1727), which was hanging on the great staircase at
Knole (Phillips, II, p. 417).
6. So good-bye… half Yorkshire: ‘Ladies of Spain’ is a sea shanty.
Half Yorkshire is an indirect allusion to the extensive estates of
Henry Lascelles, gured in the story as the Archduchess Harriet
(Nicolson; see below, Note 20).
7. a dome… poet’s forehead: the dome of St Paul’s (rebuilt by
Christopher Wren after the Great Fire of 1666) reminds Orlando
of the forehead of Shakespeare (glimpsed on p. 16). For Woolf,
‘Shakespeare was androgynous’ (A Room of One’s Own, 1928;
Penguin Books, 1945, p. 97), and this seems to calm Orlando’s
anxieties about her female-ness. Thoughts of Shakespeare’s
‘great lines’ lead on to those of the seventeenth-century poet
John Milton, whose style suggests a cathed ral bell, ringing
inside Orlando’s mind – and perhaps outside too.
8. orgulous, undulant, superb: these Latinate words suggest the
neoclassical style, just then coming into fashion. Both ‘orgulous’
and ‘superb’ mean proud or exalted; ‘undulant’ means rising and
falling like (or on) waves.
9. the Cocoa Tree… Papists: the Cocoa Tree was strictly a chocolate
(rather than a co ee) house, at 64 St James’s Street; around
1745 it became a centre for Jacobites (who would largely have
been Pap ists, i.e. Catholic sympathizers). At this time political
activists and men of letters met at (particular) co ee houses.
John Dryden (1631–1700) was the leading Restoration poet and
later in life a Catholic convert (i.e. a Papist). Joseph Addison
(1672–1719) was an essayist and an Anglican. He was
lampooned by Alexander Pope (1688–1744), also a Catholic.
There were portraits of Dryden and Pope in the Poets’ Parlour at
Knole, and one of Addison in the Leicester Gallery (Phillips, II,
pp. 439, 433). Dryden was a fre quent visitor and a close friend
and bene ciary of Charles Sackville, the sixth Earl, to whom he
 dedicated his Essay of Dramatic Poesy; Pope wrote an epitaph for
the Earl’s monument at Withy-ham (Knole, pp. 144–5, 151).
10. home in Blackfriars… suits: the Sackvilles owned Dorset House at
Blackfriars (now demolished), and Vita’s mother had lived there
at one time (Nicolson). Bow Street Runners were policemen,
named after the Bow Street law courts, near Covent Garden. The
case against Orlando parallels the ‘Pepita’ case, brought against
Lionel Sackville-West by his illegitimate cousin Henry in 1910
(see above, Chapter III, Note 12).
11. in Chancery: under the jurisdiction of the Lord Chancellor for
the duration of the case. Chancery lawsuits were those that
could not be resolved in the regular courts; the Chancellor’s
court was notori ously slow.
12. Mrs. Grimsditch, Mr. Dupper… Canute: see Chapter II, Notes 3,
35.
13. the arras… pot-pourri: see Chapter I, Notes 4, 30; Chapter II,
Notes 34, 35, 36. One particular silver hair brush in the King’s
Bedroom was supposed to have belonged to King James (though
later editions of Knole dismiss this); Knole had a special recipe
for pot-pourri, derived from Lady Betty Germain, a friend of the
rst Duchess of Dorset, whose portrait hung in the bedroom
named after her (Knole, p. 172).
14. the Prayer Book.… Royal blood: the prayer book of the executed
Mary Queen of Scots is in the Chapel at Knole (Nicolson; and
see above, Chapter I, Note 14).
15. that doctor…Browne: see above, Chapter II, Note 5.
16. High battlements of thought: in her letter thanking Virginia for
Orlando, Vita wrote, ‘There are a dozen details I should like to
go into… phrases scattered about (particularly one on p. 160 [p.
124] begin ning “High battlements of thought, etc.” which is
just what you did for me)…’ (11 October 1928, Letters of Vita, p.
305.)
17. Hair,pastry… dissemblables: dissemblables, the antithesis
of’semblables’, are things unlike one another. For an earlier
‘humane jumble’, see Chapter II, p. 55.
18. that obscene vulture: is lust (see p. 82), though whether felt by
Orlando for the Archduchess or by the Archduchess herself
remains obscure.
19. twenty million… gape: Lord Lascelles inherited Harewood House
and large estates (and income from them) in Yorkshire
(Nicolson; and Vita, pp. 49, 50). The Archduke seems
particularly concerned with the opportunities for hunting on his
estates; the gape is a disease of poultry; ‘the does slipped their
young’, means they mis carried or gave premature birth to
them.
20. the Archduke… up again: on his lack of conversation see above,
Chapter II, Note 39.
21. Fly Loo: loo is a card game in which penalties are paid into a
pool. Fly Loo, played at Knole, seems to involve betting on
 which sugar lump the ies will settle. Apparently Vita did once
win by gluing a dead y to a lump of sugar (Nicolson).
22. dipping sheep… scab: the summer section of Vita’s poem The
Land (Orlando’s ‘The Oak Tree’) describes the process of sheep
washing or dipping. The scab is a skin disease.
23. so dark… so soft: cf. Ben Jonson’s ‘Celebration of Charis, IV, Her
triumph’: ‘O so white! O so soft! O so sweet is she!’
24. a drop falling or a fountain rising: important images for Woolf: a
fountain of joy rises, at di erent times, for Mrs Ramsay, Lily
Briscoe and Cam in To the Lighthouse (1927), while the
gathering and falling drop haunts Bernard in The Waves (1931).
25. o she drove: in the MS this passage is followed by a description
of Orlando’s house at Blackfriars (see above, Note 10), which is
rather underfurnished, though the library is well-stocked, and
includes Ariosto, as well as The Faerie Queene, Montaigne and
many Eliza bethan plays.
26. if the reader… her face: the picture on p. 111 of Vita holding a
scarf over her shoulders was probably taken by Lenare in the
summer of 1927 (see letter to Vita, 30 Oct. 1927, Letters, III, p.
434). There are two ‘photographs’ of Orlando dressed as a man:
‘as a Boy’ (the frontispiece) and ‘as Ambassador’ (p. 87), but as
his hands are invisible in the second portrait, this passage
probably refers to the frontispiece. The much quoted notion that
‘it is clothes that wear us and not we them’ exposes the arti ce
of gender roles.
27. if Orlando was a woman: Nicolson points out that the details of
Orlando’s behaviour in this paragraph are all applicable to Vita,
who dressed fast, drove fast and maintained that, since the
south was downhill, the Nile must ow uphill.
28. the heroine of the celebrated lawsuit: according to Nicolson, this is
connected not to the ‘Pepita’ case of 1910 (see above, Chapter
III, Note 12) but to another much publicized lawsuit of 1913
brought against Vita’s mother concerning a legacy left her by
John Murray Scott, in which Vita was called to give evidence
(Vita, pp. 57–8).
29. billets: short informal letters, or notes.
30. routs: large evening parties, receptions.
31. the reign of Queen Anne: 1702–14.
32. her spaniel Pippin: the actual name of Vita’s spaniel (Nicolson).
33. great writer… invisible: this idea also occurs in Henry James’s
short story ‘The Private Life’ (1892), which Woolf read in 1921,
and took some notes on in preparation for writing a review of
James’s ghost stories, though she did not in the end mention it
(CE, I, pp. 28696).
34. Madame du De and: (1697–1780), a French aristocrat and wit,
she corresponded with Voltaire and Horace Walpole, and was
hostess to a salon of well-known writers and philosophers. Her
celebrated witticism, the ‘mot de Saint Denis’ (see the next
paragraph), con cerns the legend that St Denis had walked two
leagues carrying his head in his hands: ‘la distance n’y fait rien; il
 n’j a que le premier pas qui coûte.’ (The distance is nothing; it is
only the rst step which is di cult.)
35. our modern Sibyl: a sly reference to the London hostess Lady
Sibyl Colefax who lionized Woolf and whom she associates in
her diary with the ‘party consciousness’ (27 April 1925, Diary,
III, p. 13).
36. Link-boys: carried torches (links). South Audley Street is in
Mayfair, behind Park Lane, and on its corner stands Chester eld
House, built for Lord Chester eld (see Note 44, below) in 1750.
In 1927 it was occupied by Lord Lascelles and Princess Mary.
37. Piccadilly Circus… her own sex: Woolf regularly associated
Piccadilly with prostitutes and therefore with the evils of
patriarchy, though later in this chapter there is a lighter
portrayal of their way of life.
38. the Rape of the Lock … at a ball: these lines are from Pope’s The
Rape of the ‘Lock (1714), canto II, 105–9.
39. congee: bow made when leaving.
40. Addison… Spectator: Addison wrote essays both for the Spectator
and the Tatler. This passage is in fact from the Tatler (116, Thurs
day 5 Jan., 1710) and is the nal paragraph of a case brought
against the hooped petticoat. A tippet is a cape or scarf, a mu
is a cylindrical covering for keeping the hands warm, and both
were often made of fur or feathers. This passage, like the
quotation from Pope, continues the emphasis on the limitations
 imposed on women, which is one of the central themes of this
chapter.
41. Swift… Gulliver’s Travels: (1726); the quotation is from the
fourth book, ‘A Voyage to the Houyhnhnms’ (a society of
rational horses), Chapter X. Swift’s Journal to Stella, partly
written in a private code, is referred to in the phrase, ‘talks baby
language to a girl’. Swift was a friend of Lady Betty Germain
(see above, Note 13) and his portrait hung in her room (Phillips,
II, p. 426).
42. the Round Parlour: at Knole, the Poets’ Parlour (also known as
the Round Parlour or the Dining Room) is hung with portraits of
the sixth Earl’s (Charles Sackville’s) literary friends, including
Dryden and Pope (Knole, pp. 148–9; and see above, Note 9).
43. plates at dinner. ‘It is also related that Dryden, when dining with
Dorset, found a hundred-pound note hidden under his plate’
(Knole, p. 149).
44. Lord Chester eld: (1694–1773) Chester eld was a friend of Pope,
but disliked by Dr Johnson. This slightly misquoted piece of
misogyny (he actually wrote, ‘Women, then, are only
children…’) is from his posthumous Letters to his Son (5
September 1748; published 1774). A pastel portrait of Lord
Chester eld hung in the sitting-room at Knole (Phillips, II, p.
437). In the MS this passage is both more oblique and more
openly critical of Chester eld, who is classed with Mr Arnold
Bennett, Mr Desmond McCarthy and Mr Orlo Williams as among
 ‘the most illustrious of the tribe of masculinists’ (on these, see A
Woman’s Essays, Penguin Books, 1992, pp. 30–38). She adds that
Chester eld ‘forgot that children some times see things which
their elders try to keep hidden. He forgot too that children grow
up.’
45. Mr. Pope… of Women: Pope’s second Epistle, ‘To a Lady: of the
Characters of Women’ (1735), includes several satirical portraits
of contemporaries, though Woolf probably had in mind the
opening lines:

Nothing so true as what you once let fall,

Most women have no Characters at all.

Pope’s treatment of Orlando is reminiscent of Nick Greene’s in

Chapter II.
46. the plain Dunstable of the matter: a phrase meaning ‘in plain
language’, deriving from the very straight road from London to
Dunstable. Woolf would have found it spoken by a maidservant
in Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa (1748).
47. women… each other’s society: the sense of women speaking to
one another behind closed doors is also strong in Woolf’s next
book, A Room of One’s Own (1928; Penguin Books, 1945,
especially Chapter V). Vita’s cousin Edward Sackville-West
complained to Virginia that ‘Mr S.W.’, quoted in this passage,
referred to him, especially as a reference to Orlando’s cousin
appears on the following page, where her poems are mistakenly
attributed to him (Edward Sackville-West also wrote poetry).
 Woolf wrote back to him mendaciously, accord ing to Nicolson,
‘Mr. S.W. was (if anybody) Sydney Waterlow. How could it have
been you?’ (21 November 1928, Letters, III, p. 559).
48. and clip the nut trees: Harold Nicolson had planted nut trees at
Long Barn. Orlando’s night wanderings dressed as a man
parallel Vita’s (Vita, pp. 83, 95, 99).
49. a duel… followed them: in 1920 Vita had run away with Violet
Trefusis to Amiens, pursued by both their husbands (Nicolson;
and Vita, p. 108).
50. shadows’ names: Samuel Johnson (1709–84), poet, lexicographer
and man of letters, was the major literary gure of the second
half of the eighteenth century; James Boswell (1740–95) was his
friend and biographer; the blind Mrs Williams was a member of
Johnson’s household. Joshua Reynolds’s portrait of Samuel
Johnson (1769) hung in the Reynolds Room (Phillips, II, p. 419).
51. light, order and serenity: Woolf characterizes the age of
Enlightenment, contrasting it on the one hand with the violence
of Elizabethan England and on the other with the approaching
clouds of the nineteenth century.

CHAPTER V

1. the constitution of England was altered: both in the narrow sense

— that is, the principles according to which a state is governed
were changed – and, more loosely, in the sense that the
character or nature of England changed.
2. the brothers Adam: eighteenth-century architects and interior
design ers whose style was characterized by neo-classical
elegance.
3. mu n… and the crumpet: two di erent kinds of cake, usually
eaten at tea-time, toasted and with butter.
4. obfuse green: to obfuscate is to darken or obscure. In the MS this
sentence is followed by a description of the Squire’s chill and his
desire to cover everything in sight: ‘to mu e, to conceal, now
became the chief pursuit of the educated classes’.
5. British Empire… existence: i.e. in order to accommodate the
super u ous population.
6. scrolloping: see Chapter II, Note 32; the threatening vegetation
recalls that of Andrew Marvell’s ‘The Garden’.
7. ramid, hecatomb, or trophy: the statue of Queen Victoria outside
Buckingham Palace was put up in 1911. In its place Woolf
imagines a kind of funeral pyre (a hecatomb is a huge public
sacri ce) of Victoriana, including: the Queen’s own widow’s
weeds, worn since Prince Albert’s death in 1861; crystal palaces,
alluding to the one built for the Great Exhibition in 1851;
bassinettes, i.e. wicker baby-prams; military helmets, suggestive
of the Empire; Christmas trees, introduced to England by Prince
Albert; and ‘extinct monsters, globes, maps’, suggesting the
discovery of dinosaurs as well as of far-o countries. The female
gure may be Chastity, or an ideal of womanhood such as ‘The
Angel in the House’ (see ‘Professions for Women’, CE, II, pp.
 285–6); the gentleman is the Victorian patri arch, dressed in the
fashion of his day. The royal family were famous both for their
domesticity and their bad taste.
8. crinoline: a wide-hooped petticoat.
9. Elizabeth… to princes?: these words are usually supposed to have
been spoken by the dying Elizabeth to Lord Burghley’s son,
Robert Cecil: ‘Little man, little man! thy father, if he had been
alive, durst not have used that word.’
10. bombasine: a heavy dress material made from wool and silk;
black bombazine was regularly used for mourning – ‘widow’s
weeds’.
11. 86… three hundred years now: 1586 is probably the year Orlando
opens (the chronology in Knole gives this as the year Sackville
received the house from Elizabeth, though 1566 is the date
given in the text). Vita took six years to write her poem ‘The
Land’ (‘The Oak Tree’), and Virginia mocked her for it,
according to Nicolson. At this point, the MS includes a long
account of Orlando’s search for her writing self: she returns to
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, citing lines from
Thomas Sackville’s ‘Induction’ to the Mirror for Magistrates and
Charles Sackville’s lyric, ‘Tell me, Dorinda, why so gay’, in an
e ort to overcome her writer’s block and negotiate the
unsympathetic spirit of the age.
12. caracole… her life: curves and caracoles are graceful manoeuvres
made on horseback. The verses that follow parody the drearier
 verse of the period.
13. pinchbeck: an alloy resembling gold.
14. indissolubly linked together: this image of marriage may derive
from Shelley’s ‘Epipsychidion’ (1821), where it is gured as

[…] the beaten road

Which those poor slaves with weary
footsteps tread
[…] and so
The dreariest and the longest journey go.

These lines provided the tide of E. M. Forster’s second novel,

The Longest Journey (1907).
15. Lord Melbourne: Queen Victoria’s rst prime minister, often
pictured announcing her accession to the eighteen-year-old
Queen.
16. lachrymose … melli uous uencies: lachrymose means tearful;
melli uous uencies are honey-sweet owings or e usions.
17. the Archduke… Botany Bay: Lord Lascelles had married Princess
Mary, the Princess Royal, in 1922; Botany Bay is the place in
Australia where British convicts were sent for punishment.
18. Canute and Pippin: Orlando’s (and Vita’s) elk-hound and spaniel.
19. the moor… Six feathers: this scene is inspired by Emily Bronte’s
novel Wuthering Heights (1847), in which the heroine, Catherine,
loves the moor and its wild birds (in delirium she pulls the
feathers out of her pillow, naming the birds they come from).
 Woolf in cluded an essay on ‘Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights’ in
The Common Reader (1925) (reprinted in CE, I, pp. 185–90).
20. Sir Bedivere… Arthur: this episode forms the climax of
Tennyson’s poem ‘Morte d’Arthur’ (1842), later incorporated
into his Idylls of the King (1869).
21. Armada … Nelson: the Spanish Armada was defeated in 1588;
Lord Nelson fought the French and Spanish at sea, being killed
at Trafalgar in 1805. This wide historical sweep parallels the
book’s geographical panoramas.
22. a man on horseback: this scene recalls, while reversing, the rst
encounter between Jane Eyre and Mr Rochester in Charlotte
Bronte’s novel, jane Eyre (1847). Out walking, Jane is overtaken
by a rider whose horse slips on some ice so that he sprains his
ankle in the fall. Her rst words to him are: ‘Are you injured,
sir?’ (I, Chapter XII.)
23. Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine, Esquire: a romantic version of
Harold Nicolson. Vita’s pet (family) name was ‘Mar’, and she
sometimes referred to herself and Harold as ‘the mars’, thus
Marmaduke. A woman called Shelmerdene appears in Michael
Arlen’s novel These Charming People (1923), having, like Harold,
‘returned to England after a long absence abroad in Persia’.
Harold, like ‘Shel’, had ancestors from Skye, was comparatively
poor, had actually sailed round the Horn and frequently had to
live abroad, since he was in the diplomatic service (Nicolson).
24. brig: a two-masted, square-rigged sailing vessel.
25. Peelers: policemen, named after Sir Robert Peel who established
the London police force in 1829. Several of his letters relating to
the Battle of Waterloo are quoted in Knole (pp. 208–14).
26. the estates… Palmerston’s: desequestrated, i.e. released from
being held in chancery, where Orlando’s estates had been for
the duration of the trial; tailed and entailed, i.e. settled as the
inalienable pos session of her and her heirs; Lord Palmerston
was prime minister from 1855–65.
27. the whole town… rejoicings: after the Sackvilles won the 1910
‘Pepita’ case, all Sevenoaks turned out to celebrate (Nicolson;
and Vita, p. 35). Barouches and landaus are di erent kinds of
four-wheeled carriages and The Bull and The Stag are pubs in
Sevenoaks. Vita remembered leaving the car for a carriage at
the top of the hill; when they reached Sevenoaks itself, the
horse was taken out of the traces and the carriage pulled
through the main street all the way to Knole itself, amidst a
cheering crowd (Vita Sackville-West, Pepita, 1937, pp. 227–9).
28. the castle… Gladstone: the castle is Windsor Castle; W. E.
Gladstone was yet another of Victoria’s prime ministers, this
time in the later part of her reign.
29. parenthesis… Orlando’s life: Woolf is again parodying her own
previous novel To the Lighthouse, in which the deaths of several
of the main characters are enclosed in square brackets to mark
them o from the rest of the text.
30. top-boom mizzen… larboard: nautical terms – Marmaduke
explains to Orlando how various sails and spars are adjusted in
the process of sailing. Starboard is the right-hand side of the
ship when facing forwards, larboard (now usually referred to as
‘port’) is the left.
31. Pascal: Blaise Pascal (1623–62), French religious philosopher.
32. Bishop Berkeley: (1685–1753) Irish philosopher who believed
that matter only existed in so far as it was perceived.
33. Lady Derby: Lady Mary Sackville-West, Vita’s great aunt,
married Lord Derby, an eminent Victorian statesman (Knole, p.
180).
34. a ship in full sail… sails quivering: this passage, with its sudden
transpositions, is strongly reminiscent of De Quincey, and, in
par ticular, the three-decker in summer seas, bearing down on a
little pinnace, in ‘Dream Fugue’ in ‘The English Mail Coach’
(1849).
35. they reached the Chapel: Vita married Harold Nicolson on 1
October 1913 in the chapel at Knole (Nicolson; and Vita, p. 61).
Orlando’s marriage takes place during a thunderstorm (see
Knole, p. 17: ‘The chapel looks strange and lovely during a
midnight thunderstorm: the lightning ashes through the stone
ogives of the east window…’). The thunder conveniently drowns
out the moment in the wedding ceremony when the bride
promises to obey the bride groom. Woolf associated the image
 of the bird dashed against the glass with passion – see, for
example, Night and Day (1919; Penguin Books, 1992, p. 334).

CHAPTER VI

1. And then… girls: these four lines are from the ‘Spring’ section of
Vita’s poem The Land (1926, p. 49). The fritillaries are ‘snaky’
be cause of their spotted heads – this variety is also known as
‘snake’s head fritillary’. The presence of the Egyptian girls,
implying the desire of women for women, disturbs the narrative
and is smuggled in as an item of contraband past the literary
censors of the age.
2. the Hogarth Press: begun by Leonard and Virginia in 1917, the
Hogarth Press published a variety of modern writing, including
Virginia’s own.
3. the poet: Lord Byron wrote in Don Juan (Canto I, stanza 194):

Man’s love is of his life a thing apart,

    ’Tis woman’s whole existence.

George Sackville, fourth Duke of Dorset (1794–1815), had

known Byron at school (Knole, pp. 203–5).
4. think of a gamekeeper: as Lady Chatterley does in D. H.
Lawrence’s novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover, published in Florence
in 1928 and read by Vita in July (Vita, p. 199). Woolf must have
known of it by reputation earlier that year, since the
gamekeeper also appears in the MS. The male novelist who
 de nes love as ‘slipping o one’s petticoat and —’ also suggests
Lawrence.
5. Let us go, then…: the writer’s visible inertia is contrasted with
the activity of nature, which is celebrated in rhyme. Vita was
later to include this passage in her anthology of poetry Another
World Than This (1945, p. 131), in which she also published for
the rst time Charles Elton’s ‘Luriana, Lurilee’, recited at the
dinner party in To the Lighthouse (1927; Penguin Books, 1992,
pp. 120–21).
6. another in Mayfair: in 1907 Vita’s mother bought a house in Hill
Street, o Berkeley Square (Nicolson; and Vita, p. 23), where
Vita often used to stay.
7. Sir Nicholas!: Nick Greene has changed with the times,
becoming ‘the most in uential critic of the Victorian age’, a
pillar of the establishment who takes tea with duchesses (see p.
195). Vita wrote to Harold on 11 October 1928: ‘Nicholas
Greene you will recognize as [Edmund] Gosse’ (Vita, p. 202). A
year earlier, Virginia had gone to hear Vita read a lecture
chaired by Gosse:
She was fawned upon by the little dapper grocer Gosse who
kept spinning round on his heel to address her compliments
… & to be drawing round the lot of them thicker and
thicker, the red plush curtains of respectability. There was
Vita, who was too innocent to see it … I dont regret my
wildest, foolishest, utterance, if it gave the least crack to this
 respectability.
                        (30 October 1926, Diary, III, p. 115.)
Gosse wrote a regular column for the Sunday Times and it is
here that Orlando reads his article on John Donne (see p. 198).
Woolf wrote an essay on ‘Edmund Gosse’ in 1931 (CE, IV, pp.
81–7).
8. Addison’s Cato… Thomson’s Seasons: Addison’s Cato (1713) is a
neo-classical tragedy. Thomson’s Seasons (1726–30) is a long
four-part nature poem, anticipating The land in structure.
9. royalties… Messrs. —: Sir Nicholas is referring to the proportion
of the cost of a book paid to the author for every copy sold.
Vita’s The Land was actually her fourth book to be published by
William Heinemann (who had previously published Knole and
the Sackvilles).
10. a cypher language: while Harold was in Tehran (from November
1925 to May 1927), he and Vita sent each other telegrams in a
cypher called ‘unicode’ (Nicolson). The code itself (e.g. ‘Rattigan
Glumphoboo’) is indecipherable, but might be a parody of
James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, sections of which were published
from 1922 on wards as Work in Progress.
11. the Duke of Hamilton… Lord Mohun: Hyde Park had often been
the setting for duels. Knole has portraits of the second Marquis
of Hamilton in the Great Hall and one of a Major Michael
Mohun, a noted duellist, in the Poets’ Parlour (Phillips, II, pp.
416, 441).
12. the Serpentine: an arti cial lake that runs through the centre of
Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens. As a child, Woolf walked
twice a day in Kensington Gardens and often sailed boats on the
Serpentine or the Round Pond. In ‘A Sketch of the Past’ she
recalls her boat sailing to the middle of the pond and suddenly
sinking (Moments of Being, p. 86).
13. tight scarlet trousers… two dogs dancing: the red trousers belong
to a guardsman; the dogs on their hind legs recall Dr Johnson’s
notorious comparison: ‘A woman’s preaching is like a dog’s
walking on his hinder legs. It is not done well: but you are
surprised to nd it done at all.’ These overtones of militarism
and misogyny may explain Orlando’s sense that as a woman she
could not write about them in the same way as the essayists
Addison or Charles Lamb would have done: ‘one must never,
never say what one thought’.
14. Tapper said about Smiles: two minor Victorian writers — Martin
Tupper wrote facile verses (‘pretentious twaddle’), while Samuel
Smiles preached the smug doctrine of self-help.
15. eight-hour bills… factory acts: Victorian legislation to limit the
hours in a working day.
16. four-in-hand… barouche landau: di erent types of carriages.
17. four great names: Tennyson and Browning, Charles Dickens and
George Eliot. The names that follow all belong to genuine and
identi able, but mainly minor, poets, writers and historians of
the Victorian age. At this point, the MS includes a much longer
 account of the di erences between Victorian literature and its
antecedents, and, in particular, of the way in which writing has
been gentri ed and professionalized — far more books are now
published and many of them are ‘not books pure and simple but
books about books’. Orlando goes to hear Sir Nicholas lecturing
on the Romantic poets and is almost su ocated (see above, Note
7). As writers grow more respectable, patrons are no longer
sought after: Christina Rossettiturns down an invitation to tea.
Lady A. takes Orlando to see Carlyle but is chased away by his
wife: ‘Be o with you, fool!… I’d have you know my Thomas is
asleep.’ They visit Tennyson at Freshwater, only to be
intercepted by Emily in her wheelchair, who prevents them
reaching the house: ‘My husband is writing a poem.’ Writers are
now ‘enclosed in a sound-proof room and protected by a wife’.
Volumnia Fox (Virginia Woolf) is now only remembered
because Arnold Bennett once devoted half an hour to
demolishing this poor scribbler: ‘She would have been forgotten
anyhow, and the half hour spent on her might have given us
another of his master pieces.’
18. Miss Christina Rossetti: (1830–94) an intense and highly
individual poet, the subject of Woolf’s 1930 essay ‘I am
Christina Rossetti’ (CE, IV, pp. 54–60). Poetic patronage has
changed since Dryden’s day (see p. 147).
19. Suddenly she started… barrel organ: here, as earlier in the novel,
changes in the life of the body become occasions of anxiety and
disturbance within the text: the next event befalling Orlando,
 while apparent to the footman and the maid-servant, cannot
easily be announced. The narration is interrupted rst by the
sound of the barrel-organ, then thoughts of Kew Gardens (where
the lives of the plants were associated, for Woolf, with the
rhythms of the body – see Chapter XXV of Night and Day, 1919),
and then by a series of exclamations which recall, without
exactly quoting, Milton’s lines:

Hail wedded Love, mysterious Law, true

source
Of human o spring…
                             (Paradise Lost, Book 4,
lines 750–51.)

20. their outrigger: a light rowing boat (they seem to be on the river
at Kew).
21. a son… 20th: Vita had two sons, Ben and Nigel; when they
asked which of them this was supposed to be, Woolf replied,
‘Both of you’ (Nicolson). Neither was born on 20 March, though
this date is suggestively close to 17 March (1928), when Woolf
completed Orlando (see letter to Vita, 20 March 1928, Letters,
III, p. 474; and Note 39, below); it had been begun the previous
October (like the bulbs, ‘thrust into the earth in October’, at
Kew, p. 203).
22. King Edward… lady opposite: Edward had been a great visitor of
ladies, among them, Mrs Keppel, mother of Violet Trefusis (Vita,
 p. 23). With the Edwardian age come modern conveniences —
motor-cars, electric light and running water.
23. eleventh of October… 1928: the novel’s date of publication and
presentation to Vita, who, like Orlando, was then thirty-six (p.
209).
24. Marshall& Snelgrove’s: a large department store in Regent’s
Street.
25. Louise then: Louise Genoux was Vita’s French maid (Nicolson;
and Vita, p. 191). She has no time for the Prince Consort
because he was German — ‘Sale bosch!’ (i.e. dirty German). The
date is now post-1918; the First World War, in which Germany
invaded France, has taken place; George V succeeded Edward in
1911.
26. a little vulgar – all in silver. ‘The King’s bedroom is the only
vulgar room in the house… ’ (Knole, p. 15; and see above,
Chapter II, Note 34.)
27. a person’s life…Biography: Virginia Woolf’s father, Leslie
Stephen, was the rst and most important editor of the
Dictionary of National Biography, and received a knighthood for
his work on it.
28. Ra—Un… Undert—: Orlando is driving south out of London, in
the direction of Sevenoaks and Knole. As she goes, Woolf
describes the constantly interrupted view from the car window,
perhaps seeing it as symbolic of the fragmentary nature of
modern city life. The words on the banner probably stand for
 ‘Rally of the Unemployed’ or ‘Rally against Unemployment’
(popular demonstrations against unemployment had begun
again in the spring of 1928, when Woolf was writing this
section); ‘Amor Vin—’ is the opening of the Latin tag, ‘amor
vincit omnia’ (‘love conquers all’, perhaps an indication that this
is the porch of a brothel), and Applejohn and Applebed are
undertakers, thus completing the cycle of love and death.
29. Orlando did not come: Orlando’s search for another self invokes
the theme of the inadequacy of writing to represent lived time
or lives, while allowing a recapitulation of the selves as they
have appeared in the novel.
30. What, then? Who, then?: Orlando’s stream of consciousness as
expressed here parodies the staccato, exclamatory style used by
James Joyce.
31. Oak Tree… Prize: Vita’s poem The Land had won the Hawthorn-
den Prize in 1927 (Nicolson; and Vita, p. 172). Vita used the
prize money to plant a grove of nut trees at Long Barn. Woolf
renamed the prize after Angela Burdett-Coutts, the great
Victorian philan thropist, perhaps to make the point that such
prizes are seldom established in women’s names, and in any
case cannot have the same signi cance for a woman as for a
man.
32. porpoise in a shmonger’s shop: this description of Vita, which
Virginia often teased her with, derived from a shopping trip to
Sevenoaks they made together late in 1925 (see 21 December
 1925, Diary, III, p. 5 2; and Nicolson). Woolf wrote to Vita, ‘Aint
it odd how the vision at the Sevenoaks shmongers has worked
itself into my idea of you?’ (5 February 1927, Letters, III, p.
326).
33. There ies the wild goose: the unattainable wild goose may
symbolize supernatural intervention (see the introduction, p.
xxxviii); or else the search for self or for an elusive reality
(perhaps identical with that described at the end of A Room of
One’s Own: ‘whatever it touches, it xes and makes permanent’
(1928; Penguin Books, 1945, p. 108); or, as in the MS, ‘the
secret of life’. As Shelmerdine lands at the end of the poem, it
appears again.
34. whipcord breeches… Lopokova: Orlando changes into Vita’s
favourite country dress. Lydia Lopokova was a ballerina,
married to the economist (and Bloomsburian) Maynard Keynes.
35. red Spanish wine: Vita always drank a Spanish wine called Allella
(Nicolson).
36. In this window-seat…: the di erent rooms of Knole are evoked
for the last time (see above, Chapter IV, Note 13; and earlier
notes).
37. the loud speaker… Vienna: the radio’s transference of sound
through space parallels the movement of Orlando’s memory,
traversing the history of the house.
38. old Greene… Milton: the Hawthornden Prize had been presented
to Vita by John Drinkwater on 16 June 1927 — Virginia went to
 the presentation (Diary, III, p. 139; and Nicolson). Orlando
contrasts the reception of the poem with the private experience
of writing it.
39. the roar of an aeroplane: Harold Nicolson had once own from
Paris, landing on the cricket eld at Knole, while Vita had
called, ‘Here Hadji, here!’ (Nicolson.) In the darkness, her pearls
are like the phosphorescent ares used to light up runways. The
MS ends as follows:
And as Shelmerdine leapt from the aeroplane & ran to meet
her a wild goose with its neck outstretched ew above them.

Shell cried Orlando

    The [wild] goose is —
‘[The secret of life] is…’

The End.                                                             March 17th

1928
 Appendix

A list of the substantive readings from the rst British (Hogarth

Press) and rst American trade (Harcourt Brace) editions, excluding
variants in punctuation, capitalization and spelling. Further minor
di erences between the texts are that the British rst edition
numbers chapters in Roman numerals, the American in Arabic; the
British ‘Contents’ page lists the preface but not the index, while the
American lists the index but not the preface; no reference to the
jacket illustration occurs in the American edition (since it had a
di erent jacket) but a few extra entries appear in the American
index. Page and line numbers given below refer to this edition, the
rst entry being from the British rst edition, the second from the
American rst edition.

5.28 Keynes; Mr. Hugh Walpole; Miss Violet

Dickinson;   ]   Keynes; Miss Violet Dickinson;
6.5 Raymond Mortimer; Lady Gerald
Wellesley;   ]   Raymond Mortimer; Miss Emphie
Case; Lady Gerald Wellesley;
6.8 Nicolson; and my sister, Vanessa
Bell   ]   Nicolson; my sister, Vanessa Bell
11.26 winter and summer   ]   winter or summer
12.14 reach whatever seat   ]   reach what ever seat
14.17 thirty or perhaps forty,      ]      thirty, or forty
perhaps,
17.1 a commanding hand, too; a hand      ]      a
commanding hand; a hand
19.31 blame Orlando?   ]   blame him?
20.22 bade him do.]bade him.
21.7 Old Stairs and the beer gardens      ]      Old Stairs
and such places
21.33 their loves had been active;   ]    their love was
active;
23.2 Euphrosyne — so he called
them   ]   Euphrosyne – to give them the names
he called them
26.32 raved, so he stared.   ]   raved, so he called her.
27.2 had eyes   ]   had those eyes
27.12 bite; shut bite and shut
28.36 Maypole (comme une grande
perche   ]   Maypole (une grande perche
31.1 pailful   ]   pail full
37.3 they would y. They would take ship to
Russia.      ]      they would y north; thence to
Russia.
39.26 vanished it was   ]   vanished and was
39.29 lit up and the strangest   ]   lit up the strangest
39.34 transformation. As they
approached   ]   transformation. The sounds too
seemed closed and concentrated. As they
approached
40.35 orange peel on to the ice which a
dog   ]   orange peel at the actors which a dog
42.3 in these purlieus   ]   in this purlieus
44.8 gay city had been stood   ]   gay city had stood
44.13 huge and massy fragments   ]   huge and many
fragments
45.4 were dashed against a tree and sunk      ]      were
dashed to death and sunk
52.10 he looked like; know      ]      he looked like, and
know
52.11 what he thought – and it is for readers such as
these that we write –   ]   what he thought and
felt and it is for readers such as these alone that
we write —
56.34 man with big, bright eyes.   ]   man with bright
eyes.
58.6 solitude of years solitude of many years
59.34 but the lips hung loose and slobbered.      ]      but
the lips slobbered.
60.2 servility of a well-trained domestic’s face;
 it      ]      servility of the face of a well-trained
domestic; it
62.8 the Elizabethan age was inferior      ]      the
Elizabethan was inferior
65.15 would seem very dull   ]   would seem dull
67.1 ‘For’, he said, ‘I have done with men.’   ]   ‘For,’
he said, patting the little brutes on the head, ‘I
have done with men.’
67.13 Dogs and a bush were the whole of it.   ]   A dog
and a bush were the whole of it.
68.29 coloured it a thousand tints, and lled it
with   ]   coloured it all the tints of the rainbow
and lled it with
73.27 and their windows were lit though they lay
dying.   ]   and the windows were lit though they
were dying.
75.16 ninety-nine pages more      ]      twenty-nine pages
more
82.8 Thus he rushed   ]   Then he rushed
83.5 Howbeit, the Fates were hard      ]      [No new
paragraph in American edition]
84.18 and even to use the imagination.   ]   and even
to make use of the imagination.
85.14 The houses were white as egg-shells and as
 bald.   ]   The houses were bare and bald as egg-
shells.
89.33 they conjured up   ]   they conjured him up
91.7 lest the native population should be seized …
fraught with      ]      lest the native population …
fraught with
91.14 valuable, if only because it impressed upon them
… the superiority      ]      valuable … because it
impressed upon them … superioiity
92.15 the cynosure of all eyes    ]    the sinecure of all
eyes
94.15 applied remedies   ]   applied the remedies
97.11 where there are ivy and curtains in
plenty.’   ]   where there are curtains in plenty.
97.35 he was a woman.
 
 
    The sound of the trumpets   ]
he was a woman.
    The sound of the trumpets
101.7 the older men and women   ]   he elder men and
women
101.17 ramparts, to the breasts of doves, and the anks
of kine.] ramparts, and the plains to the anks of
kine.
102.34 blank version poem,   ]   blank verse poem,
110.7 if I can’t swim,   ]   if I can swim,
113.30 wonder, as she pitted      ]      wonder if, as she
pitted
114.26 war-horse, nor even   ]   war-horse, not even
118.9 on top, a covey of swans oated,
orgulous      ]      on top, oated a covey of swans,
orgulous
119.16 aware by a succession   ]   aware of a succession
123.4 The poet’s, then, is the highest      ]      The poet’s,
then, in the highest
123.11 Thoughts are divine, etc. Thus   ]   Thoughts are
divine. Thus
125.8 their meaning, she threw      ]      their meaning
upon the mind, she threw
131.26 seems to hint   ]   seem to hint
132.15 in Orlando, which is to be found if the reader
will look at page 144, even in her face. If   ]   in
Orlando, which is to be found even in her face. if
132.25 been the same.   ]   been the same too.
133.10 would argue, for example, if Orlando was a
woman, how did she   ]   would argue how, for
example, if Orlando was a woman, did she
133.29 rattling on the cobbles.      ]      rattling over the
 cobbles.
135.21 into such an excitement?      ]      into such
excitement?
137.4 none to answer, ‘is this’, she nished her
sentence all the same, ‘what people call life?’
The spaniel      ]      none to answer, ‘is this what
people call life?’ The spaniel
138.9 su ering from the e ect of three honeyed
words      ]      su ering from the poison of three
honeyed words
138.25 glimpse she had of these great men from the
deck   ]   glimpse she had of the poets from the
deck
139.17 that the world has seen.   ]   that the world has
known.
143.8 What are “we”?’   ]   What are we?’
145.2 men of genius. Nor were they so di erent from
the rest of us as one might have
supposed.   ]   men of genius, yet after all they
were not much di erent from other people.
149.19 beneath a ne willow tree.   ]   beneath a willow
tree.
150.19 the young woman looked up at him   ]   the girl
looked up at him
 153.3 lose it. The task is made still more di cult by
the fact that she found it   ]   lose it. What makes
the task of identi cation still more di cult is
that she found it
153.14 of breeches she exchanged the
seductiveness   ]   of breeches she turned to the
seductiveness
154.25 the great Roman shadow,      ]      the great rolling
shadow,
154.27 that ever left human lips; that have ever left
human lips;
156.16 All was darkness;   ]   All was dark;
157.1 The great cloud which hung,      ]      This great
cloud which hung,
157.29 grown; trousers were fastened      ]      grown and
trousers fastened
157.30 legs the country gentleman soon
transferred   ]   legs he soon transferred
157.31 tables were covered; nothing was left
bare.   ]   tables were covered too.
158.8 dogs, mats, and china ornaments, the home
—   ]   dogs, mats, and antimacassars, the home
—
162.5 on one day at least of every year,   ]   on one day
 at least every year,
162.13 but no, she detested   ]   but not, she detested
163.12 end. Meanwhile she began   ]   end. And so she
began
163.18 tried drama.   ]   tried the drama.
163.26 pool, which, I dare say, has the same carp in
it.   ]   pool, with, I dare say, the same carp in it.
164.2 she began to decorate   ]   she tried to decorate
165.19 as though it were asking      ]      as though they
were asking
165.27 the third nger   ]   the second nger
167.23 to be the left hand   ]   to be the left nger
168.21 She became nervous lest      ]      She had become
nervous lest
173.10 irises and gentian.   ]   irises and gentians.
173.16 and then thought ‘No,   ]   and then she thought,
‘No,
174.11 things which will be described      ]      things
besides, which will be described
174.27 hastily from the breakfast-room   ]   hastily out
of the break-fast room
174.29 Mercifully its tail   ]   Mercifully his tail
175.20 to heave that overboard,      ]      to stow that
overboard,
175.29 could say anything, which is
tantamount   ]   could say any-thing they liked,
which is tantamount
175.32 London, things which London, which
180.11 in our eyes, some of it rubs o on our
thoughts)      ]      in our thoughts, some of it rubs
o on our words)
180.32 their brooms and their saucepans      ]      their
brooms, their sauce pans
182.12 taking care lest it should slip past the joint of her
nger.      ]      taking care that it should not slip
past the nger joint.
182.14 on the third nger   ]   on the second nger
183.11 lest the pen might have been      ]      lest it might
have been
183.17 As she wrote she felt some power (remember we
are dealing with the most obscure manifestations
of the human spirit) reading over her shoulder,
and when she had written ‘Egyptian girls’, the
power told her to stop.   ]   At this point she felt
that power (remember we are dealing with the
most obscure manifestations of the human spirit)
which had been reading over her shoulder, tell
her to stop.
184.23 whatever sum the Hogarth Press
 may   ]   whatever sum the publisher may
184.25 predicament into which      ]      predicament in
which
187.5 wasp. Where there is blood there is life. And if
killing   ]   wasp. And if killing
187.29 and begin at least to think of a
gamekeeper   ]   and begin to think, at least of a
gamekeeper
190.12 Human beings alone are thus gifted.   ]   Human
beings alone have this power.
190.36 lordships’ legs, they haven’t taken to reading
there.   ]   lord-ships’ legs, ‘they haven’t taken to
reading there.’
192.23 some time or other. But where?   ]   some time
or other before. But when? But where?
192.31 ‘Sir Nicholas!’ she exclaimed.   ]   ‘Sir Nicholas!’
she replied.
198.7 ceaselessly in a circle.   ]   ceaselessly in a circle
round her.
198.12 on her nger. She read a sentence and looked up
at the sky; she looked up at the sky and looked
down at the newspaper. Life?   ]   on her nger.
She was distracted between the two. She looked
at the paper and looked up; she looked at the
sky and looked down. Life?
199.35 ridiculous, like my hyacinth, husband I mean,
Bonthrop: that’s what it is — a toy boat on the
Serpentine, ecstasy — it’s ecstasy that matters.
Thus she spoke aloud,      ]      ridiculous, ‘like my
hyacinth, husband I mean, Bonthrop: that’s what
it is — a toy boat on the Serpentine, it’s ecstasy
— ecstasy.’ Thus she spoke aloud,
202.2 lectures on the In uence] lectures upon the
In uence
202.6 all those fur tippets   ]   all these fur tippets
204.32 the midwife, putting her rst-born child into
Orlando’s arms. In other words   ]   the midwife.
In other words
206.5 cry now. Water was hot      ]      cry now. People
were much gayer. Water was hot
206.31 one side and the future   ]   one side, the future
206.32 ran downstairs, she jumped into her motor car,
she pressed the self-starter.   ]   ran downstairs,
jumped into her motor car, pressed the self-
starter.
209.17 a girl’s? — young, slender, seductive — a girl, by
God! furred, pearled, in Russian trousers; but
faithless, faithless!   ]   a girl’s – furred, pearled,
in Russian trousers – young, slender, seduc tive
— a girl, by God! but faithless, faithless!
209.28 shop towards her.   ]   shop toward her.
209.33 white owers, and old ships that it
brought      ]      white owers and Russian sailors
that it brought
211.12 dispute. For it is a di cult business –
   ]   dispute. Indeed it is a di cult business —
211.35 was written ‘Ra—Un’,   ]   written in great letters
‘Ra—Un,’
212.9 the chopping up small of identity which   ]   the
chopping up small of body and mind, which
212.30 person to call, directly      ]      person to say,
directly
213.32 all were di erent      ]      all these selves were
di erent
214.21 morning listening to the pigeons on ne
linen;   ]   morning on ne linen; listening to the
pigeons;
214.22 Spoilt? Perhaps. Too many things for nothing.
Hence my books (here she
mentioned      ]      Spoilt? Perhaps (here another
self came in). My books (here she mentioned
214.32 Trees, she said. (Here another self came in.) I
love trees (she was passing a clump) growing
there a thousand years.   ]   Trees, she said. (She
was passing a clump. Here another self came in.)
 I love trees, trees growing there a thousand
years.
215.2 question.) I don’t know. Chattering,
spiteful,   ]   question.) Chattering, spiteful,
215.6 I like peasants.   ]   Peasants I like.
215.10 and we must snatch space to remark   ]   and we
must here snatch time to remark
215.12 this culmination to which the whole book
moved, this peroration with which the book was
to end, should be dashed from us      ]      this
culmination and peroration should be dashed
from us
215.27 here and there like a barbaric necklace   ]   here
and there (another self came in) like a barbaric
necklace
215.28 she sang, accenting the words strongly, ‘and see
the moon   ]   she sang, ‘and see the moon
216.15 came over her (she had passed through the lodge
gates and was entering the park).   ]   came over
her as she passed through the lodge gates into
the park.
216.26 established they fall silent.   ]   established there
is nothing more to be said.
217.9 signi cance themselves,      ]      signi cance in
themselves,
 218.2 as theirs had stored in them a myriad
moods   ]   as theirs had been had stored in them
a myriad moods
218.7 each other for close on four centuries
now.   ]   each other close on four centuries now.
218.13 come to them as boy and woman, crying and
dan cing,      ]      come to them as child, as man,
crying and dancing,
218.34 however faintly,   ]   however faint,
219.1 laid with whole oak trees   ]   laid with oak trees
220.30 the marking of veins and petals.      ]      the
markings of veins and petals.
220.31 on his gaiters was visible; she   ]   on his gaiters;
she
223.3 as if whenever the gulf of time gaped   ]   as if
every time the gulf of time gaped
223.24 a shadow without substance   ]   a shadow and
without substance
223.29 comprehensible. Her mind began to toss like the
sea. Yes, she thought,   ]   comprehensible. Yes,
she thought,
224.17 partly something else, as if her mind had become
a forest with glades branching here and there;
things came nearer, and further, and mingled
 and separated and made the strangest alliances
and combinations in an incessant chequer of
light and shade. Except when Canute,   ]   partly
something else, and each gained an odd moving
power from this union of itself and something
not itself so that with this mixture of truth and
falsehood her mind became like a forest in
which things moved; lights and shadows
changed, and one thing became another. Except
when Canute,
225.26 and the garden blowing irises      ]      and the
gardens blowing irises
226.4 Nelson had gone. ‘And there’, she
thought,      ]      Nelson had gone. ‘And that,’ she
thought,
226.17 on all your dishes,   ]   on all the dishes,
226.23 elds, cottages with lamps in them,      ]      elds,
lamps in cottage windows,
226.33 Cape Horn. She looked into the darkness. There
was   ]   Cape Horn. There was
227.15 sky and sea. Then he came.   ]   sky and sea. It
was then that he came.
227.27 As she spoke, the rst stroke of midnight
sounded.      ]      Immediately, the rst stroke of
midnight sounded.
*The Captain must have been mistaken, as a reference to any
textbook of literature will show; but the mistake was a kindly one,
and so we let it stand.
*These sayings are too well known to require repetition, and
besides, they are all to be found in his published works.