New edition of virginia Woolf, Orlando
Karina Jakubowicz writes about a scholarly edition of Orlando from Cambridge University Press
Orlando: A Biography
The Cambridge Critical Edition of the Works of Virginia Woolf
Edited by Suzanne Raitt and Ian Blyth
(Cambridge University press, 2018)
Orlando is typically a slim volume of roughly two hundred pages. Even with several illustrations, an index, and a scholarly introduction, it is always slightly bendable, light enough to be put in a bag and promptly lost. The Cambridge Critical Edition of Orlando breaks from this tradition in spectacular fashion, coming in at six hundred and fifty-four pages and weighing more than two pounds. As an object, let alone as a book, it is a reminder that Orlando is far more than it seems. Despite being conceived by Woolf as a light-hearted romp, it’s rich with historical, literary, and personal allusions that leave the reader dazzled, and occasionally overwhelmed. Four hundred years of life are crammed into its six chapters. Orlando is a young nobleman, born into the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. He sees the Great Frost of 1608, and is then appointed as an ambassador by King Charles II. He sleeps for seven days while living in Constantinople, and wakes to discover that he has become a woman. Orlando then returns home to England, only to find that her sex has instigated a legal battle over the ownership of her ancestral home. She wins the court case, marries, publishes a book, and her story comes to an end on 11 October 1928.
There is a great deal in this short text for Suzanne Raitt and Ian Blyth to unpick, and their task is made all the more difficult by the romance that underpins it. Part of Orlando’s appeal to modern readers is the knowledge that its protagonist is based on Woolf’s lover, Vita Sackville West. If there is anything more complex than deciphering the influences behind a text, it is untangling those at work in a relationship. Raitt and Blyth had to understand one in order to make sense of the other, and neither are as straightforward as they first appear. The introduction charts the ups and downs of the love affair in detail, explaining the evolution of the text alongside an affair that was already coming to a close when Orlando was first conceived.
The editors show that Woolf’s love for Sackville West was complicated by jealousy and distrust. She disliked what she saw as her lover’s sense of entitlement and lack of creative bravery, and felt pangs of competitive envy when Sackville West achieved success. Orlando began life as a bid for Sackville West’s attention when she shifted her affection from Woolf to another woman. Woolf responded by writing a book that was flattering, but that also threatened to expose Sackville West’s sexuality and subject her to ridicule. Raitt and Blyth demonstrate that Orlando is not quite, as Nigel Nicolson has suggested, ‘the longest and most charming love letter in literature.’ Instead, they show it to be the product of several conflicting feelings of which love was just one. However, Nicolson’s comparison is accurate in the sense that the book is filled with hidden meanings. As the American author Mark Z. Danielewski has noted, ‘the greatest of love letters are always coded for the one and not the many,’ and Orlando is filled with private references that were not intended for a wider audience. The forensic approach of Raitt and Blyth uncovers a great deal that might otherwise be lost. Woolf’s portrayals of Knole in Kent, Sackville West’s childhood home and the model for Orlando’s country house, contain details that would only be recognisable to someone intimately acquainted with it. These include accounts of the rooms and their contents, and the names of several staff members. More personal information is also present, for example, in the numerous and vivid descriptions of Orlando’s legs, an attribute of Sackville West’s that Woolf particularly admired.
It is impossible to decode all of the references in Orlando, and many jokes and allusions will undoubtedly remain what they were meant to be: a private language between two lovers. But enough has been uncovered by the editors to indicate not only the importance of the relationship to the text, but the extent to which it formed the foundation of Woolf’s writing process. She hunted doggedly for information about her subject. She also took a significant amount, occasionally verbatim, from Sackville West’s account of her family history, Knole and the Sackvilles (1922). She also asked Sackville West for minor details, such as whether she ground her teeth at night, and for more emotive ones, such as the nature of her quarrels with her first lover, Violet Trefusis.
The rigour of the editors does not remove any of the text’s mystery, but instead gives it new and intriguing dimensions. The book is arranged into layers of material, with an introduction divided into composition history, publication history, early critical reception, and editing. The endnotes are also split into explanatory and textual, the former committed to elucidating meanings, and the latter devoted to tracing the differences between the published version and the proofs. Encountering all this information is like entering the scene in the book when Orlando returns to her manor house after years in Constantinople:
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.
The reading process is akin walking down these corridors and examining a succession of priceless antiques. Obsolete terms from the sixteenth century are explained, as are historical details that might otherwise be missed. As the editors write in the introduction, ‘Orlando can be read as a social history, documenting the changing habits of everyday life with minute precision.’ They add that the book is ‘intent on reconstructing how people actually lived at different historical moments,’ some of which Woolf lived through herself.
If the original work can be called a spiritual biography of Sackville West, not her life as such, but an evocation of the influences at work in her life, then this edition performs a similar function for Woolf. It shows Orlando to be the result of a lifetime of reading and the product of her experiences, friendships, and interests. As the editors explain, it is ‘the most ‘richly allusive’ of all her novels, ‘with its deliberate attempt to invoke the literature and literary style of each period.’
This version of Orlando is ideal for readers who prefer digging into a book rather than coasting along on its surface. It’s possible to stop numerous times on a single page to flip to the explanatory notes and back again. Reading ‘around’ the text in this way feels in keeping with a narrative that rapidly jumps from one century to the next. The disorientating nature of the story means that, rather than distracting the reader into ‘losing their place,’ the explanatory notes often account for where and what this place might be. This can be taken quite literally in the case of note 233:16, which concerns a pub in Sevenoaks, Kent. The quotation in question concerns the excited response of the locals to the news that Orlando has won her court case, ‘Addresses were read from the Bull. Replies were made from The Stag.’ The note explains that the Bull has been running since the year 1800, and can still be found on the High Street in Otford. However, as note 233:17 attests, ‘There was no pub called ‘The Stag’ in Sevenoaks.’ A similar case is presented in note 204:14, where the editors query the location of Orlando’s London residence by studying its view. Orlando looks out of a window and sees St Pauls, The Tower of London, and Westminster Abbey all at once, but the editors’ sharp eyes notice an error. They explain that while two of these landmarks were visible from houses owned by the Sackvilles, it is ‘impossible to see all three buildings from one vantage point.’ In this case, as with The Stag, the ‘place’ is nowhere at all.
The Cambridge Editions of the Works of Virginia Woolf are always diligently researched, and the editors write extensively on the development of the text. This formula is particularly meaningful for Orlando, a book that purports to be a biography. Raitt and Blyth have produced a biography of a biography, one that is in the spirit of Woolf’s attitude to the genre. They understand the text as having multiple ‘lives’ and ‘afterlives.’ What is true of the protagonist is true of the original publication. Just as Orlando’s life is not limited to the years allotted to a normal human being, so the editors understand that the life of the text extends back into the decades and centuries prior to it having been produced. They are assiduous in tracking down historical information, even in cases where Woolf appears to have overlooked or omitted aspects of the truth. They trace links to other texts that Woolf read, and frequently find links to other works that she wrote herself.
Woolf produced the book in a rush of excitement, and this partly explains why the original manuscript differs from the printed versions. And Woolf was cautious about Sackville West’s response. The copy that she sent to her omits elements such as the phrase ‘Jour de ma vie,’ whispered by Orlando to Sasha to indicate that day of their elopement. The phrase is the Sackville family motto, and Sasha is a thinly veiled representation of Violet Trefusis. The inclusion of the words in the printed version embeds Sackville West’s identity into a relationship that was rooted in sapphism. Yet Woolf also made concessions to her friend’s feelings. For example, she omits a parody of the Hawthornden Prize, which was won by Sackville West for her poem The Land.
The text evolved even as it went to the printers, with the first 179 pages sent ahead so that Woolf could presumably keep working on the remainder. When the proofs arrived, she set about correcting one set for the American edition and another for the British, beginning (so the editors believe) with the American version first. Woolf changed the text so rapidly that the printers charged her £28 3s 6d for making last-minute alterations, almost half the cost of the typesetting for the entire book. By tracing the differences between the extant proofs and then following this with a careful study of the early reprints, the editors are rewarded with enlightening fragments of information. One in particular, that the name Pepita is changed to Lolita in the second edition, is especially revealing. Pepita is the name of a Spanish dancer that Orlando is said to have eloped with prior to becoming female, but it was also the name of a woman who had been a mistress of Sackville West’s grandfather. This relationship was common knowledge due to a major court case that saw Pepita’s eldest son claim that he was the legitimate heir to the Knole estate. The editors believe that this change may have been the result of a bitter letter that Woolf received from Sackville West’s mother, who made it clear that she despised the book and its author.
The editors follow the publication history with a short section on the early critical reception of the text. They compare its reception to that of Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness, published in 1928. Whereas Hall’s novel was lambasted for its open discussion of lesbianism, Orlando, for all its obvious references to cross dressing and homosexuality, was a bestseller. The text itself is reproduced shortly afterwards, and although it is reprinted as a facsimile of the British first edition, it is sadly misshapen. Both the Cambridge and the first editions are produced on the same sized paper, but in the Cambridge example the text looks bloated on the page and sinks into the binding. I assumed this was for the sake of retaining the original page numbers, but it turns out that these differ slightly from the first edition, so it’s hard to see the purpose. There are, at least, endnote numbers at the bottom of each page, and this keeps the original text clean while providing a handy reminder that there’s more to discover at the back of the book.
When the book is closed it returns to being the very solid object that it appeared at the outset, but it is impossible to shake the impression of a text that is animated and fluid. The information provided by the editors renders it even more like its protagonist, an embodiment of a process rather than a fixed identity. The Cambridge edition is the most recent stage in this process, and marks a significant moment in its life as a book. The editors understand the work as rooted in the history of its own production, and in the influences surrounding that production. Moreover, they acknowledge the uneven terrain that results from Woolf’s attitude to the biographical form. They carefully sift the truths from the half-truths, and succeed in separating each piece of granite from its accompanying rainbow. In doing so, they have made an edition that strays into the territory of another genre. If Woolf can be said to have written the longest love letter in literature, then this book is a love letter to a love letter. It is less personal, less poetic, but nonetheless devoted.
Karina Jakubowicz
May 2020
