Orlando: Writing Vita, Writing Life
Orlando: Writing Vita, Writing Life, lecture by Karina Jakubowicz, 20 and 27 February 2021
Blog by Lisa Hutchins
Orlando (1928) – ‘the longest and most charming love letter in literature’ according to Nigel Nicolson, son of Vita Sackville-West. However, he picks the wrong genre. Virginia Woolf did not choose to frame her novel in epistolary terms, but as life writing. In her session for Literature Cambridge Karina Jakubowicz told us how Woolf's imaginative biography of her friend and lover employs many of the most traditional elements of biography and yet, on closer reading, subverts and undercuts them too.
Karina opened with a lovely visual illustration of the book's dual nature, the opening pages of an edition with a frontispiece of Orlando as a boy on the left-hand leaf and, divided by the binding, a dedication to Vita on the right. She discussed how this very traditional framing primes us immediately to look for a person in the text. Identity at this point, she said, is manageable. We are faced with a tale of two identities, that mirror each other.
But the preface complicates this picture considerably. Karina described it as one of the more remarkable in English fiction as Woolf thanks no less than 53 people, many of whom are dead. She acknowledges authors including Daniel Defoe, Sir Walter Scott and Emily Brontë. She names three rather lowly assistants at the Hogarth Press, and two people (including the wife of J.M. Keynes who was not always treated very politely by the Bloomsbury circle) for their expertise in languages that do not appear in the text. She mentions many friends and family connections of herself and Vita, officials of the British Museum and Record Office, and finally ‘a gentleman in America’ who has been kind enough to write in with corrections. He is urged to ‘not spare his services on the present occasion’. (Karina told us that this gentleman is fictional but an amalgam of real correspondents of Woolf's.) This preface tells us immediately what to expect from the book through its mischievous and playful tone, its blending of facts with imaginary occurrences and its irreverent attitude to genre conventions.
The two women were from different classes, with different incomes and different social circles. But they shared a common interest in writing and had become friends within a year of meeting in 1922. The relationship soon turned romantic but, as Orlando was written, it was becoming strained. Karina characterised the work as a romantic undertaking but also as a way for Woolf to possess, control and win Vita back in the sphere of imagination, and even as a veiled threat, as Vita's identity and family history are pretty freely referred to (a circumstance that alienated her mother from Woolf for the rest of her life).
Karina looked at how other works by Woolf can help to shed light on Orlando. We heard how, in 1907, she wrote a short story, Friendships Gallery, an imaginative retelling of the life and adventures of her friend Violet Dickinson that remained unpublished until 1979. The relationship had an idealised, romantic quality that was an accepted feature of Victorian-era female friendships, and it was at its height as the story was written. The story prefigures Orlando with its mock-heroic style, irreverent tone and heightened telling of Violet's life. Violet is one of the 53 people to receive Woolf's thanks in the preface.
In 1958 Woolf's essay ‘The New Biography’ was published as part of Granite and Rainbow, a posthumous collection of earlier works previously overlooked for publication as a collected edition. It includes the essay 'The New Biography' and Karina highlighted this extract for us as an insight into Woolf's thinking about life-writing:
If we think of truth as something of granite-like solidity and of personality as something of rainbow-like intangibility and reflect that the aim of biography is to weld these two into one seamless whole, we shall admit that the problem is a stiff one and that we need not wonder if biographers have for the most part failed to solve it. (p. 149)
It is no exaggeration to describe biography as the Stephen family business. Leslie Stephen, father of Virginia, wrote serious traditional biographies of learned men and also edited the Dictionary of National Biography. But Karina told us how some of Woolf's circle were finding other ways to approach the genre. Lytton Strachey published his satirical work Eminent Victorians in 1918, and Harold Nicolson, Vita's husband, had published his genre-defying essay collection Some People in 1926. Woolf had this to say about it (also from Granite and Rainbow):
Few books illustrate the new attitude to biography better […] He has devised a method of writing about people and about himself as though they were at once real and imaginary. He has succeeded remarkably, if not entirely, in making the best of both worlds. Some People is not fiction because it has the substance, the reality of truth. It is not biography because it has the freedom, the artistry, of fiction (p. 152).
In Orlando, according to Karina, Woolf experiments with a way of writing not just Vita, but life. She writes Orlando as both a single person and several people of different genders living in different eras. (Vita, in her day-to-day life, could manifest many different lives and identities based around gender, family history or occupation). Karina suggested that Woolf tries to capture the fact that a life cannot be captured and this is what makes Orlando such a slippery protagonist, not just that he/she lives well beyond the boundaries of a conventional life. She asked if we may be reading a novel inspired by Vita that is actually a portrait of Woolf. It is Woolf that chooses the facts and allusions, letting us know what she finds attractive, desirable or amusing. Orlando is a testimony to feelings and a portrait of the influence of one person on another – and is therefore, in its own way, actually an autobiography.
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• Karina Jakubowicz writes about the recent scholarly edition of Orlando from Cambridge University Press on the Literature Cambridge blog here.
• Literature Cambridge will be studying A Room of One's Own next, with three sessions given by Alison Hennegan and Trudi Tate between Saturday 3 March and Sunday 14 March 2021.
