Orlando: A Biography

by Virginia Woolf. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co. 1928. 10mo. 333 pp. $3.00.

IN her new novel, which she labels a biography, Virginia Woolf has gone skvlarking and played a monstrous joke on modern biographers. Her preface, solemnly acknowledging help received from authorities and friends, arouses a suspicion which is confirmed as the story unfolds. The hero-heroine, Orlando, is introduced as a Court boy sparring with a Moor’s head in a sixteenth-century attic; and we take leave of him, a woman in her thirties, at an airplane tryst with her husband three centuries later. Meanwhile he has been in turn a poet-lord, an ambassador to Turkey, a gypsy girl in Greece, an eighteenth-century English lady, and a Victorian mother. The volume is duly rounded off with an index. Even the illustrations contribute to the mischief, for they are photographs of the present Miss Sackville-West, on whom the author is said to have drawn for Orlando’s later character.

Each episode in the headlong narrative is built up with the fullness of outward detail that biography now affects. The age of Elizabeth shows the glamorous contrasts that Mr. Strachey can be counted upon to give it in his forthcoming book; the nineteenth century is costumed in crinolines, and reaches its climax in a midnight wedding amid thunderclaps. The successive ages of England take their turns at the pillory. Mrs. Woolf has aimed her mockery not merely at history, but at the infallibility of historians and their weakness for primary colors. Human character is less simple, and the spirit of an age less easily approached, than writers like to believe. Her method of showing them up at their own game is compounded of mock-heroics and flights of extravagant nonsense, irony, poetry, caprice, and shimmering wit.

All this seems far away from the Virginia Woolf of Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse. It is, indeed, off the track of the experiment laid out in those two books; but it is no less an experiment, and an interesting one. Beneath the mockery will be found a theme that has haunted Mrs. Woolf before — the relativity of the time element in human affairs. In Mrs. Dalloway it ran through the story in the hourly striking of the clock. In the magnificent second chapter of To the Lighthouse time dwelt quietly in a deserted house while the haste of the world’s events went on apart. Here in Orlando time is almost the protagonist — minutes are expanded and years are telescoped according to the urgency of the character, centuries being compassed in a single life. The time of an action may be insignificant, while the time of a thought is spun out to enormous lengths. Whatever may be said for the illustration offered in Orlando’s life, the force of the general truth will not be lost on any reader. In a way Mrs. Woolf has added a fourth dimension to human nature, a new province for the novelist to exploit.

Orlando confirms the judgment that Mrs. Woolf is the most brilliant of the English experimenters. Her great gifts of language and intuition are joined in this book with a deep-lying sense of humor, and a wit that plays like summer lightning over a sky already bright with stars. It is unnatural that she has not won a larger body of readers. ‘The transaction between a writer and the spirit of the age,’ she says, ‘is one of extreme delicacy, and upon a nice arrangement between the two the whole fortune of his work depends.’ In an age of Einstein and radio, speed and confusion. this novelist, who makes time and complexity her themes, has offered better terms to her age than her age has yet acknowledged.

MARSHALL A. BEST