Novels of Great Women

Abstract

Virginia Woolf strongly believed that Western History was constructed around the lives, particularly the battles, of “great men.” Knowing that women’s lives and activities had a place in that history, she constructed the two novels in this chapter to demonstrate the accomplishments of women in both the public and private arenas. The result is Orlando and Between the Acts, whose interior authors both exemplify the “active verb” described by Shaw and their place in the world over time.

Orlando 1928

From an entire novel comprising a single day, Woolf moves to a tale of one life spanning three hundred years, as she explores the rigors of time in exaggerated style in both novels. However, Woolf fashions Orlando as a singular work; it is both a “love letter” to her friend and sometime paramour, Vita Sackville-West, and an extension of her plot to reimagine the English novel. In her diary, Woolf muses about having done with novels and inventing a new novelistic form (WD iii, 176). Indeed, her sixth novel has never been confined to a single genre, and contemporary critics offer various labels: anti-novel, magic realism, fairy tale à clef, ghost story, and modernist feminist biography.¹ Moreover, the novel meets almost all the requirements for these various classifications. Nonetheless, Woolf herself describes Orlando as written “half in a mock style very clear and plain, so that people will understand every word. It is based on Vita … .” (WD, 162). The editor of Woolf’s diaries, Anne Olivier Bell, confirms: “Orlando may be regarded as an offering of love to Vita Sackville-West.”²

Woolf’s offering depicts a vivid procession of English history told from the perspective of Vita’s distinguished family, which traced their descent from William the Conqueror, were honored as Earls of Dorsett in the Renaissance, and were “granted the vast Kentish house of Knole by Elizabeth I.”³ The young Orlando descends from a long line of “fathers [who] had been noble since they had been at all. They came out of the northern mists wearing coronets on their heads” (O, 14).⁴ From this privileged position, Orlando leads his charmed life as a courtier, lover, ambassador, and, after a long sleep and a change of sex, a gypsy vagabond, a wife, a mother, a literary patron, and finally a celebrated author as a “long liver” spanning three centuries, much in the fashion of Shaw’s characters in Back to Methuselah.

However, despite his/her many exploits, writing, or the desire to write, becomes the only constant throughout the story of Orlando’s longevity, a tale so complex that Woolf creates a fictional biographer to chronicle Orlando’s journey through time. The reader first meets Orlando at age sixteen, and the novel concludes in a supposed compliment to Vita’s youth, vitality, and literary talent as Orlando, after three hundred years, finally reaches her thirty-sixth year! Early in the novel, Orlando announces himself as an inspiring interior author as he proclaims his desire to be a fine poet with honor to his name (O, 81). She/he achieves this goal in grand fashion when she/he wins the Burdett Coutts Memorial Prize for “The Oak Tree,” the poem that has been Orlando’s life-long project (O, 312). Woolf’s remarkable depictions of Orlando, his interior biographer, and their relationship to modernism and censorship are the focus of this chapter.

Modernism

Orlando became a modernist work when Woolf, describing her latest project’s inception, exclaimed, “I could revolutionize biography in a night.” To effect this revolt, Woolf sought to create a blend of the granite-like facts of her subject’s life with the rainbow aspect of his/her personality.⁵ Although, on balance, Orlando displays more rainbow than granite, Woolf’s intermingling of the details of the lives of Vita and her ancestors creates a fact-filled fictional account that reveals the composite figure of Orlando. However, the modernist vein of the work goes much deeper than Woolf’s early proclamation suggests and Orlando has endured to become a key modernist text.⁶ For example, allusions to other writers and thinkers inform the counterpoint of Orlando, allowing Woolf to incorporate the discourses of “law, sexology, religion, history, poetry, and biography,” much in the same manner as these various voices appear in T.S. Eliot’s modernist masterpiece, The Waste Land.⁷ Also, as a feminist modernist biography, Orlando endeavors to protect and celebrate the life of Vita, as opposed to the often harsh treatment of their subjects by her contemporary male biographers such as Vita’s husband Harold Nicolson and Woolf’s friend Lytton Strachey.

Orlando also blatantly critiques prominent social institutions and their accepted practices. For instance, Woolf’s pillorying of the medical profession, so explicit in Mrs. Dalloway, continues in Orlando but in a comic mode.⁸ One of Orlando’s apparent methods for navigating his/her longevity is to sleep periodically for unusually long periods of time. After Orlando’s first week-long sleep in the early modern era, doctors are called and after Woolf ponders the possible meaning of such slumber—could it be death in small doses?—and concludes that the medical profession had little knowledge and could only state the obvious, that Orlando slept for seven days. (O, 66–68). And when Orlando’s next long slumber occurs in Turkey, medical science is simply dismissed by stating that the doctors did what they could but he slept anyway (O, 133).

Also, in Orlando Woolf introduces subjects that would have caught the eye of the censors, both governmental and societal, but the modernist styling and humorous tenor of the novel evaded those conservative factions.⁹ For example, as in Jacob’s Room and Mrs. Dalloway, prostitutes provide a heathy balance to Orlando’s introduction to the pretentious society of learned eighteenth-century authors and wits. When Orlando the woman, now dressed as a man, meets Nell on a dark street, she invites “him” to her room, and upon realizing that Orlando is a woman, introduces her to her “working” friends. Together they form a different kind of society, one of trust and open friendship, which Orlando finds more invigorating than that of the famous authors (O, 216–20). This significant scene introduces the taboo subject of “women’s love,” one of the key elements in the novel (WD iii, 167). Also, by endowing these minor forbidden female characters with a scintillating coterie and a quiet dignity of their own, Woolf creates a vehicle for censuring the social purity movement, for confronting the censorships of the day, and for critiquing roles available to women at that time,¹⁰ much as Shaw does in Mrs. Warren’s Profession.

Woolf’s experimental modernism also allows her to explore what Adam Parkes identifies as non-reproductive sex and gender that “coalesce most obscenely in lesbianism.” Parkes continues that in Orlando, Woolf examines how same-sex love can challenge both public censorship and private mores in covert but discernable ways.¹¹ She depicts this modernist technique not only in the scene with the prostitutes, but also in the preposterous entanglements of Orlando, both as a man and a woman, with the ambisexual Archduke/Duchess Harry/Harriet, who pursues Orlando relentlessly as either sex (O, 1133–18; 178–86). Orlando resoundingly rejects the Archduke while illustrating Woolf’s views on the fluidity of gender assignments. More complimentary to women (and to Vita in particular, who frequently wore masculine-styled clothing) is the passage briefly describing Orlando’s exploits while wearing men’s or women’s attire. She notes that her early writings were published under a pseudonym, and that Orlando was equally content as either female or male and made love according to her current gender (O, 220–21).¹² With this sanguine approach, Woolf conceived Orlando as a heathy, erotic character, comfortable in herself in either male or female form, in contrast to the fin de siècle decadent writers such as Swinburne or Baudelaire.¹³ Nevertheless, with the creation of her “ambisexual” character, Woolf skirted the outer boundaries of polite society, illustrating that the challenge of the modernist author involves becoming adept at the use of functional ambiguity, the art of expressing one’s meaning without exposing oneself to censorship.

Orlando, much more life-affirming and exuberant than Jacob’s Room and Mrs. Dalloway, became an attempt to recover from the sense of loss experienced as a result of war in the previous two novels. Through satire of the pomp surrounding Orlando’s early life, the Spirit of the Age (Victorian morality), and finally, societal influences in the twentieth century, Woolf creates a vehicle for celebrating the “sapphist” (Woolf’s term) relationship she shared with Vita, the multifarious talents of women, and the joy of writing in her own voice, while also denigrating the constraints placed on women throughout the ages. A bold representation of women’s lives and loves for the early twentieth century, Orlando showcases Woolf’s often humorous use of blended genres, satire, and exaggeration, the same literary devices deployed by Shaw to score his revolutionary points. These literary devices served the very real purpose of shielding the “teasing sensuality” of the same-sex love letter from the censorious eyes of the British officials who prosecuted Radclyffe Hall’s lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness for obscenity and seized Norah C. James’s The Sleeveless Errand one year before Orlando’s publication.¹⁴ The married Vita’s affairs with women were a topic of public scandal; thus both the subject and the work itself risked running afoul of the social purity movement and government censors.¹⁵

Vita

Despite the risk of increased notoriety, Vita, the object of Woolf’s expression of admiration and devotion, exclaimed that she was both “thrilled and terrified…at the prospect of being projected into shape of Orlando. What fun for you; what fun for me…. You have my full permission.”¹⁶ The story of Orlando, as relayed by Woolf and her interior biographer and interior author, mirrors Vita’s life in both subtle and obvious ways. Orlando’s grand abode (O, 22), for instance, represents Vita’s ancestral home, Knole, and its illustrious inhabitants recall Vita’s own ancestors. However, although patrilineal laws forbade Vita from inheriting her childhood home, Woolf restored the mansion to Vita when a court case against Orlando was resolved in her favor, granting her full title to her home and property. Vita’s own grandmother Pepita, a renowned Spanish dancer, was mistress to Vita’s grandfather, an ambassador, whom Orlando represents when he supposedly fathers several children with a dancer named Pepita (O, 132). This outlandishly romantic family saga thus flatteringly aligns Vita with what Rachel Bowlby terms “the gypsy, the artist, the woman celebrity.” In addition, Woolf celebrates Vita’s own androgyny and penchant for assuming separate identities in Orlando’s gender-bending transformation, referenced in many passages such as Orlando’s exchange with Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine about how compatible each was with both sexes (O, 258).¹⁷ Even Vita’s love life with other women appears in Orlando. Her former lover Violet Trefusis is represented by the unfaithful Russian princess Sasha, while her rejected lover Lord Lacelles appears as the Archduchess Harriet.¹⁸

Vita’s writing itself was definitely not the main attraction for Woolf; rather, she was intrigued by Vita’s complex life, which included her art, her bold lifestyle, and her noble ancestry. Woolf’s letters reveal her views on Vita’s long poem The Land: “But the subject and the manner, so smooth, so mild, may be what I dislike” (WL iii, 141). The two writers, Vita and Virginia, would frequently debate “whether poetry could be ‘old-fashioned rather than modern’ and how it differed from prose.” Although Woolf felt The Land “lacked a little transparency—some sudden intensity,”¹⁹ she paid tribute to Vita the writer, as lines from Vita’s The Land appear in the text as Orlando’s writing (O, 265), and the famous literary prize awarded to The Oak Tree (O, 313) recalls The Hawthornden Prize bestowed on The Land in 1928.²⁰

However, beneath the unabashed declarations of “sapphist” love, Woolf plotted a more intellectual and purposeful study, primarily about the lives of women and the impact of the repressive, proper English society upon their very existence. For example, through representations of Vita and her family, Orlando presents what is usually a patriarchal history of Britain from a female perspective, questioning whether her protagonist can work—usually a male prerogative—and/or enjoy love and marriage, usually gendered female.²¹ Woolf’s hero/heroine must also confront how “public space in England” through the ages is occupied by men and women. Additionally, throughout the novel, Woolf denigrates the essentialist concept of a stable self or identity, of conventional “history,” and of established literary conventions.²² Similarly, Shaw’s academic, business-like Brothers Barnabas do not enjoy the fantastical life of Orlando, but their journey through time in their search for a longer life span yields a familiar result. Orlando, by eschewing fame, prizes, and the opinions of other writers, may, like Conrad and Franklyn’s long-lived descendants at the conclusion of Shaw’s play, someday approach the essence of life as pure thought. Woolf also questions the theory of linear time and predicts a long life span as Orlando, a single individual with no notion of death, weaves through several centuries, much as Shaw posits a long life for humans through Creative Evolution in his play. Shaw wrote Back to Methuselah, his time-traveling opus, just as Woolf wrote Orlando: to illustrate that life can evolve through time and that the actual life span of an individual is always in dispute.²³ Steven Putzel believes that Woolf wrote to Shaw, praising Back to Methuselah after having read it in 1921. Although Woolf’s letter is not given, Shaw’s reply is revealing: “I am very glad you got the hang of it. It is not everybody’s book…. Your letter is reassuring for I value your opinion very specially.”²⁴ This exchange suggests the possibility of a deeper connection between Back to Methuselah and Orlando. In addition to exploring the limits of the human life span, just as Shaw does, Woolf also employs the critique of the accepted notion of time to revolutionize the accepted features of biography—as practiced by her father, Sir Leslie Stephen—by upending the conventional types of the genre, and by creating a hero/heroine who, like Vita a notable Englishman/woman, would be ineligible for inclusion in Sir Leslie’s Dictionary of National Biography.²⁵

Characters Who Write

However, at its heart, Orlando remains Woolf’s quintessential, innovative novel that features characters who write. Authors, famous and otherwise, waft in and out of Orlando’s life story, which begins at age sixteen and spans three hundred years, and becomes so uproariously convoluted that Woolf invented an interior biographer to chronicle Orlando’s adventures. To document this fantastic life, Woolf provided all of the trappings of a conventional biography of “a great man,” such as family pictures and the acknowledgments of the assistance of friends and family, as much of the novel satirizes the genre as practiced by her father and other eminent Victorians. Early in the novel, Orlando’s passion for writing and his vow to bring honor to his family name ignite a desire to meet and converse with other poets. Consequently, Orlando practically overflows with both historical and fictional characters who write, as well as their writing accoutrements. Woolf explains the genesis of this fascination with writing by likening Orlando’s early carnivorous love of reading to a dangerous malady, suggesting that “the disease of reading…weakens [the system] so that it falls an easy prey to that other scourge which dwells in the ink pot and festers in the quill. The wretch takes to writing” (O, 75). In several of her famous disquisitions on writing, Woolf portrays writing, so central to her own life and work and to those of the characters considered in this study, as an infectious disorder. She also accurately acknowledges that “Anyone moderately familiar with the rigours of composition will need not to be told [Orlando’s] story in detail; how he wrote and it seemed good; read and it seemed vile…and could not decide whether he was the divinest genius or the greatest fool in the world” (O, 82).

Letters

As in all of Woolf’s novels, written communication takes many forms. One of the most basic, accessible levels of writing, letters—so prevalent in Jacob’s Room and Mrs. Dalloway—appear in many varieties in Orlando but still represent written communication that marks important events and furnishes critical information about the life of Orlando. In the sixteenth century, Orlando, seeking to meet and converse with a famous writer, sends a “document” to the well-known poet, the historical Robert Greene, now called Nicholas Greene, expressing his admiration for his work and inviting Greene to visit Orlando’s noble estate. This missive proves central to Orlando’s life and work, as the long-lived Greene becomes, at various times, comic muse, harsh critic, and supportive patron to Orlando throughout the centuries depicted in the novel. Later, when Orlando is named Ambassador Extraordinary to Constantinople (O, 118), lavish celebrations in honor of Orlando’s dukedom cause such an uproar and an ensuing fire that the only surviving description of that infamous night is a letter written by General Hartopp’s daughter Penelope to her friend in Tunbridge Wells (O, 128–29). The Biographer offers portions of the letter to depict the evening’s revels, while the records of British officials are lost or damaged in the fire. This account privileges traditional women’s writing—the lowly handwritten letter—over the version created by high governmental bureaucrats, as it survives to become part of the “official record” of Orlando’s tenure in Constantinople.

After becoming a woman, escaping the Ambassador’s residence, and living for a time with “gipsies,”²⁶ Orlando embarks for England and the eighteenth century. Upon her arrival in London, lawyers appear to revoke her title and place her estates “in Chancery” because of the many incredulous episodes in her life. After a sojourn at her ancestral home, Orlando returns to London and immediately receives invitations to the best houses in the city. These invitations facilitate the introduction of Orlando to her then-current literary heroes Joseph Addison, Alexander Pope, and Jonathan Swift. However she soon tires of their company, for despite their witty writing, they were dull companions (O, 202–11). After her marriage to Shelmardine, Orlando receives written notice from the Queen restoring her titles, and property, and recognizing her sex as female (O, 254–55). Thus reinstated, she begins to write again and again remarkably meets Nick Greene, now an important man of Victorian letters. Greene insists on reading Orlando’s text and this time proclaims “The Oak Tree” a work of beauty and truth and even writes a prophetic note to a well-known publisher (O, 280–283). Overcome with Greene’s unexpected appearance and his offer to publish her work, Orlando relies on a modern form of communication, the telegraph—the perfect vehicle for the cryptic language she and her husband Shel invent for themselves—to share her incredulous news. Thus, through sixteenth-century official documents, personal letters that bear witness to history, notes giving entrée to English literary society, “lines” that result in publication, and instant communication through telegrams, written communication establishes markers and offers some validation of Orlando’s unwieldy story. Thus Woolf once again demonstrates the remarkable place of letters, in all their varied forms, in the annals of history and the lives of individuals, including her own, with her innovative novel as a love letter to Vita.

Woolf on Writing

Woolf herself cautions against the misuse of written communication as she pauses in mid-story to ponder some notable shortcomings of writing throughout the century. For example, after Orlando’s disappointment with poetry at the hands of Nick Greene and his heartbreaking affair with Sasha, Woolf imagines a nostalgic interlude in which a writer might describe Orlando’s pain and the slow passage of his long days without his two loves: poetry and the princess (see pp. 170–71). Yet Woolf rejects sentimental descriptions of nature and other lyrical subjects traditionally thought suitable for such occasions and satirically suggests that a simple conclusion would suffice (O, 97–9). Later, Woolf considers how and why nineteenth-century writing changed—for the worst. After relating how “damp, which is the most insidious of all enemies” invades the inkpot, she considers the results of this invasion, “sentences swelled, adjectives multiplied, lyrics became epics.” One “sensitive” soul, realizing he could do nothing to stop this unnecessary explosion of language, even committed suicide because of this incursion of “damp” into the English language (O, 228–29).

Woolf then examines the problems with the writing of contemporary biography, concluding that “thought” and “life” form the sole subjects of the genre. Calling these topics “wool-gathering,” after lengthy deliberations, she opines that a writer must at least question the meaning of life. Her conclusion: “Alas, we don’t know” (O, 266–71). Thus, having sufficiently mocked her own art form, Woolf also contemplates the writers and poets responsible for many of these variations throughout the centuries. These historical figures, all men, similarly serve as indicators of the current age in Orlando’s long journey through his/her three centuries of life. Some of these luminaries are only mentioned, noted as the young Orlando’s favorite writers—Shakespeare, Marlowe, Ben Jonson, Browne, Donne (O, 88)—while others actually inhabit the pages of the novel. Initially, the mere mention of the names of the eighteenth-century literary lights—Addison, Dryden, and Pope—fascinated her (O, 197). However, upon meeting them in the great houses of London, Orlando attempts to record their bon mots, but found they had nothing to say (O, 208). These distinguished men, all fit subjects for the Dictionary of Literary Biography, become foils to the young Orlando, who writes diligently but must wait three hundred years to win recognition and a prize.²⁷ When describing Orlando’s brief relationship with Pope, Woolf humorously and ironically mentions that these literary giants are merely dull companions who often in conversation repeat the contents of their well-known books.²⁸ Nevertheless, these luminaries ultimately exert little influence on Orlando’s writing.

Nicholas Greene

However, the sixteenth-century poet Robert Greene, infamous denigrator of Shakespeare, serves Woolf now as Nicholas Greene, not only as a character who writes, but also as a means of satirizing the literary arenas in both the sixteenth and the twentieth centuries. Greene thus assumes a pivotal role in Orlando: a minor character with major implications for Orlando the poet.²⁹ Orlando’s early desire to surround himself with poets leads to his invitation to Greene to be his guest at his country estate (O, 84). Although the slovenly appearance and bitter demeanor of his noted guest surprise Orlando, Greene proves a lively, engaging companion, as he descants on the all things poetic, issues harsh criticism of other poets, and proclaims the “Glawr” of classical literature (O, 88). Although Orlando revels in Greene’s company, Woolf unmistakably paints the poet as “subliterary and money-driven,”³⁰ perhaps to underscore the young man’s naiveté, both as a judge of character and as a writer. Nonetheless, Orlando agrees to become Greene’s patron. However, his reward soon after their six-week sojourn together is Greene’s “spirited satire” on the young lord’s “Death of Hercules.” Entitled “Visit to a Nobleman in the Country,” Greene’s essay harshly mocks Orlando’s work, calling it “wordy and bombastic in the extreme” (O, 95–6). Thus, Greene becomes Orlando’s first critic and caustic censor, causing Orlando to “burn fifty-seven of his poetical works,” saving only one poem, “The Oak Tree” Nevertheless, Orlando continues to seek Green’s good opinion, which does not materialize, and failing that, Orlando makes his first of many declarations to write only what he enjoys writing (O, 103).

After suffering throughout the years from Greene’s stinging rebuke, as part of Woolf’s fantasy, Orlando reunites with this debilitating force in the twentieth century. However, Greene, now reincarnated as a dapper and successful man of letters, has become an important figure in the literary world (O, 277). Happily, he reverses his opinion of Orlando’s work and now serves as Orlando’s literary benefactor, as will be discussed below. When Greene miraculously reappears in the twentieth century, he functions not only as a plot device to secure Orlando’s fame, but also as a vehicle for delivering Woolf’s most withering critique of literary criticism.³¹ For example, when Lady Orlando rediscovers London after her long absence, one of the great marvels of the new age is the evolution of the bookshop, where actual books and critical journals—not the manuscripts of the sixteenth century—are sold. After purchasing many volumes and weekly newspapers, she reads an article by Greene on the collected works of John Donne and realizes that a writer must carefully censor his/her own opinions (O, 284–85).

In addition, Woolf employs the time-traveling Greene to reinforce her theory of time as cyclical³² and also her idea of one person as having multiple selves, which she considered a positive element in the lives of human beings. Thus Woolf creates Greene’s “many selves”—writer, critic, patron—to both hinder and finally assist Orlando’s writing life. Ultimately, the relationship of Orlando and Greene adumbrates Woolf’s lifelong love/hate concern with being “popular,” her longing for positive reviews while prizing independence as a thinker and writer who needs no patron or publisher.³³

But however integral to Woolf’s novel the fantastical Greene becomes, he does not qualify as an interior author in Orlando. His oversized personality and his sway over Orlando as a writer, not his literary works themselves, prove central to the novel. And despite his looming presence, Woolf further demeans Greene by representing his poetical clout as secondary to that of his old nemesis. For although Woolf, through the Biographer, devotes numerous passages to Orlando’s quest for inspiration from famous authors, Shakespeare, as both the shadowy figure of an unknown bard and the poet of such renown that the Biographer dares not speak his name, eclipses Greene to exert the most influence upon Orlando. Woolf presents Shakespeare as a poet who relishes anonymity and strives for independence from “identity, gender, class” in order to achieve the “radical freedom of the present moment,”³⁴ a role that Orlando herself comes to seek at the conclusion of the novel. The title of the novel also pays homage to the Bard, and even Orlando’s story line follows the pattern of Shakespeare’s romantic comedies by having all sources of anxiety dissolve into marriage, thus reassuring the reader that all will be well.³⁵

The New Biography

However, another character who writes also holds the distinction of being one of the most analyzed figures in Woolf scholarship and qualifies for the position of interior biographer. Known only as the Biographer, this character chronicles the life of Orlando’s eponymous hero and also critiques one of Woolf’s main literary pursuits, that of reinventing traditional biography.³⁶ In addition to Orlando, Woolf wrote two biographies: Flush, a charming tale of the life of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s dog (1933), and a more traditional account of the life of her friend, Roger Fry: A Biography (1940). Her interest in the genre most likely relates to her relationship with her father, and although she remained devoted to this often difficult, demanding central figure in her life, critics often trace her ideas about biography to a personal revolt against Sir Leslie and the Victorian “life and times” method of life writing that he practiced so well.³⁷

Woolf’s letters and essays also provide insight into her thinking about this reinvention. In “The New Biography” (WE iv, 473–80), she reflects on Sir Sidney Lee’s ideas about the purpose of biography, “the true transmission of personality.” Woolf dissects this concept into the difficulties of reporting both truth and personality and suggests that most biographers cannot capture his/her subject’s actual nature. She further posits that in the twentieth century biography changed, as did other literary parts, whereby the Biographer was no longer a companion to his subject but “an equal,” free to select and blend elements of his subject’s life. “[H]e has ceased to be the chronicler; he has become an artist.”³⁸ Interestingly, Woolf had just read Some People (1927) by Harold Nicolson (Vita’s husband), a book “half true, half fantasy in which real people…were put in imaginary situations and vice versa.”³⁹ After reviewing the book, which blended fact with fiction in the New York Herald Tribune, “something of its manner crept into Orlando.”⁴⁰ Much of the concept of Woolf’s new novel as a creature of fantasy based on an actual person (Vita) derives from Nicolson’s work, a strategy that infuses Orlando with imaginative characters and situations and contributes to the book’s satire. Nigel Nicolson, son of Harold and Vita, notes that “Orlando does not change her nature when she changes sex. All the time she is curiously like Vita—competent, audacious, standoffish, often tongued tied.”⁴¹ The inside joke becomes that Woolf employed the literary style of her friend, Harold Nicolson, to write a novel, actually a love letter, fashioned after and dedicated to his wife!

The artist in Orlando: A Biography is most definitely Woolf; however, as part of her artistry and of her revolt against Victorianism, she introduces the character of the Biographer, who attempts to record the expected “life and times” of Orlando’s property, accomplishments, looks, and personal habits in a manner that critic and biographer Arnold Bennett might condone.⁴² Such a character proves most useful in relating Orlando’s unusual circumstances as a long-lived, amorphous being with fluid social circumstances, usually depending on his/her sex, who rejects the usual essentialism of the Victorian biographer. However, the satiric, often inept “Interior Biographer,” as a character who blunders through the expected conventions of biography, serves as a catalyst for Woolf’s revolt against its expected norms and illuminates Woolf’s interest in biography as a literary genre and art form. Critics hardly know how to describe the Biographer: “incomplete narrator,” “self-conscious and exaggerated,” “straight-laced and heavy handed” have all been applied to this unusual interior biographer. Yet, because of Woolf’s frequent references to the writing of Orlando as fun, “child’s play,” “half-mocking style,” and a “joke,” one cannot discount the Biographer as comic vehicle. The Biographer becomes not only a method for creating a flamboyant, exaggerated love letter to Vita, but also an integral part of the parody of Victorian male biography—including that by Bennett—and serves as a shield against the censor for the “racier” episodes in the novel. Woolf demonstrates that a conventional Victorian biography could not adequately convey such a fantastical life spanning three hundred years and the many “selves” that fill that one life—Orlando in all his/her varied forms.⁴³

Critics frequently comment on the role of voice in Orlando, as the Biographer, the protagonist Orlando, and the author Virginia Woolf repeatedly exchange speaking roles in the text. For Christine Froula, for example, “there is a good deal of Woolf in Orlando, particularly in the liberating theories of being, identity, biography, autobiography, and poetry.”⁴⁴ Others emphasize the slipperiness of the narrating Biographer, who at times speaks like Orlando and at others like Woolf. For Parkes, “The theatrical instability of the narrator’s role suggests some striking similarities with the vacillation of Orlando. Mimicking the tones now of conventional morality, now the biographer or historian, the narrator puts on voices as Orlando puts on clothes…. The apparent interchangeability of Orlando and the narrator contributes to the indefinite nature of character, prompting one to ask where Orlando begins and the narrator ends.” The sometimes dizzying, vacillating interchange of voices in some respects resembles the hysteria found in the shell-shocked character Septimus Smith in Mrs. Dalloway.⁴⁵

I suggest that, in general, Woolf’s own voice delivers the many long set pieces, the disquisitions on her abiding topics, such as time (O, 98–9), gender (O, 188–89), the multiplicity of selves (O, 308–09), literary criticism (O, 285), and, most of all, writing. The many examples of her discussions on writing poetry, and the writing process itself, take up much of the novel and become one of its several subtexts. For example,

Thus, the most extraordinary movement in the world, such as sitting down at a table and pulling the inkstand towards one, may agitate a thousand odd, disconnected fragments…. Instead of being a single, downright bluff piece of work of which no man need feel ashamed, our commonest deeds are set about with a fluttering and flickering of wings. (O, 78–9)

The Biographer fulfills his role by chronicling the episodic events in Orlando’s life from the golden boy of the noble house to his ambassadorship to the coffee houses of London: “From deed to deed…he must go, his scribe following after, till they reach what ever seat it may be that is the height of their desire” (O, 15). His famous slippages of role, rushing the story, omitting critical details, censoring himself and Orlando, add to and enlarge the novel’s scathing critique of conventional biography. Woolf even undercuts the traditional role of the Biographer by burying the news of Orlando’s new-found fame in her recounting of her many selves, not as a major life event to be extolled by the Biographer. He complains, “[W]e must here snatch time to remark how discomposing it is for her biographer that this culmination and peroration should be dashed from us ….” (O, 312).

Orlando’s voice often expresses the toils of love and writing and often makes one of his/her great pronouncements in the seldom-heard first person: “I have done with men” (O, 96); “I will write what I enjoy writing” (O, 175); and “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?” (O, 286).

Woolf created this tripartite voice as a radical rebuke of the often singular, linear voice of conventional biography, traditional binary gender assumptions, and the many purveyors of censorship, all of which impeded her ideas, her writing, and her life as a woman. These resounding voices become an important aspect in Woolf’s attempts to reinvent the novel and to write her own truth.

Interior Biographer

Accordingly, the Interior Biographer both narrates the long life story of Orlando and also disrupts that narration, primarily by commenting on several aspects of the accepted style of biography. For example, the Biographer interrupts himself (he reveals that he is male early in the novel) to ponder possible explanations for Orlando’s preferences of fashion and language, and after a lengthy discourse, concludes that Orlando’s tastes were merely simple (O, 37). Once again the Biographer interrupts Orlando’s story, “The biographer must not stop either, but must fly as fast as he can” to keep pace with Orlando’s love life (O, 46). The Biographer also states that he wishes to spare the reader the details of an uproariously difficult period in Orlando’s life: “Would that we might …write Finis to our work!… the austere Gods who keep watch and ward by the ink pot of the biographer, cry no!” (O, 133–4).

Woolf’s idiosyncratic Biographer also exhibits a kind of double vision that requires him to maintain his own staid views while recording the life of the more unconventional Orlando. This double vision contributes to his inept account of Orlando’s life and reveals the misogyny merely hinted at in the scene with the prostitutes and revealed more boldly “when we write of a woman, everything is out of place—culmination and perorations, the accent never falls where it does with a man” (O, 312). He continues to explain what topics he would rather not convey, such that “leave it to others” becomes almost a mantra for his life-writing style. The Biographer seemingly relinquishes his role most frequently on the topic of sex and sexuality. For example, while relaying the improbable account of Orlando’s change of sex, the Biographer proclaims, “But let other pens treat of sex and sexuality: we quit such odious subjects as soon as we can” (O, 139). This attitude continues as the Lady Orlando unexpectedly establishes friendships with the group of female prostitutes, the Biographer again frees himself from the burden of description (O, 220). Next, after providing sparse but tantalizing details of Orlando’s supposed affairs, the Biographer again reneges with a terse “we express no opinion” (O, 222).

The role of the Biographer as censor has received much critical attention, partially because of the notoriety surrounding the prosecution of Hall’s Well of Loneliness on charges of indecency.⁴⁶ And because Woolf’s “love letter” to Vita contains passages that could be construed as depicting same-sex affairs—or in Woolf’s preferred word, “sapphist,”⁴⁷—along the lines of Hall’s more explicit novel of lesbian love, the mock censorship of the Biographer adds cover to these passages, which are often humorous. Woolf develops the highly charged issue of such suppression partly to parody the work of government censors at the behest of the social purity movement and exaggerates and satirizes that censorship through the character of the prudish Biographer.

Not surprisingly, following Orlando’s change of sex, the Biographer frequently limits or omits Orlando’s exact speech to protect her reputation as a lady. During her voyage to England, Orlando momentarily reverts to her male role to describe a coquette, “We had a word for them. Ah! I have it… (But we must omit that word; as it disrespectful in the extreme…on a lady’s lips)” (O, 156). The Biographer also notes the care taken by the prostitutes not to let their intimate conversation leave their rooms. The Biographer cautions “but hist—and but hist again” as the desires of these women are about to be revealed (O, 219).⁴⁸

However, the Biographer soon grows weary of maintaining the pretense of a censor. At the initial meeting of Orlando with her soon-to-be husband Shel, they have a strange exchange. After a close encounter with his horse, Shel exclaims, “Madam…you’re hurt!” She replies, “I’m dead Sir!” At this juncture, a sizeable blank space appears on the page of the novel and then the Biographer continues, “A few minutes later, they became engaged” (O, 250). The blank space covers what was surely an erotic conversation between would-be lovers. Thus the prudish Biographer once again shields the reader from what he deems inappropriate passages. Similarly, the Biographer suppresses yet another of the couple’s conversations: “hence the most ordinary conversation is often the most poetic, and the most poetic is precisely that which cannot be written down. For which reason we leave a great blank here…” (O, 253).⁴⁹

Of course, Woolf, through the Biographer, has difficulty condensing all of Orlando’s long life into one book. The Biographer complains that he does not have room in a traditional biography for all of Orlando’s many selves because a biography is considered complete “if it merely accounts for six or seven selves, whereas a person may have as many thousand” (O, 309). So Woolf resorts to humor, often overstatement and exaggeration—two of the comic hallmarks of Shaw’s drama—to signal both the very quick and sometimes also the very slow passage of time in Orlando’s life. “And then, in the space of three seconds and a half, everything had changed—she had broken her ankle, fallen in love, married Shelmardine” (O, 263). Nonetheless, after their marriage, Shel sails away to the Cape Horn, and the ink pot and pen beckon to Orlando. Since the Biographer believes that observing a writer at work does not yield an active existence, the Biographer resorts to marking time (O, 267). The Biographer actually names all twelve months of the year to show the passage of time but, more importantly, draws attention to Orlando as a writer.⁵⁰ The Biographer relays these two critical phases of Orlando’s life in the final pages of the novel to underscore the difficulty of capturing such an unusual being. Apparently growing weary of his task, the Biographer becomes surly and even abuses the reader, stating that one should not eavesdrop on a person talking to her/himself (O, 310).

Another crucial function of the Biographer becomes to dispel current social inhibitions and scientific theories about sexual “inversions” and to reassure the reader that Orlando survived her uncanny life experiences in a sanguine manner.⁵¹ Because of Orlando’s equanimity throughout, the Biographer expects the reader to accept the more unusual elements of the story in like manner. For example, Orlando’s startling change of sex did not perturb her, she merely resumed her life (O, 139). Thus, as both narrator of the story of Orlando and disruptor of that narrative, the Biographer delights in his subject, ponders and relates the many exploits of Orlando as both man and woman, glosses over major life events such a childbirth, and concludes with a joyful reunion of the now successful poet and her beloved Shel (O, 392).

Orlando as Interior Author

But what of the writer, the subject of the Biographer—the handsome, noble, vigorous youth who loves poetry and lives a fantastical, complex life (including a change of sex) and who ages only thirty-six years in the novel’s three-hundred-year time span? Orlando, the Biographer’s delight, has only one constant in his/her long life—writing—and who, as such, must be recognized as the genuine interior author of the novel, the character whose writing and writing life illuminates Woolf’s own ideas. Orlando expresses strongly held views on everything from biographical writing to same-sex love to censorship to writing in one’s own voice and, in many ways, the joys and terrors of all authors who are obsessed with the “pen and the ink pot.”

Woolf created an interior author for Orlando as a stark contrast to the previous two internal writers considered in the previous chapter, Jacob Flanders and Septimus Warren Smith. Orlando becomes almost comic relief when compared with the elusive Jacob and the war-damaged Septimus. As if in response to criticism of the aforementioned novels, Woolf asserted that her new “biography” would be completely understandable but that she recognized the challenge of balancing fact and fiction (WD iii, 162). To achieve this desired writing style, Woolf invented the explicit writing life of her central interior author to mark the various stages and important events in Orlando’s long life. Although Orlando writes, revises, and often destroys many of his/her creations through time, one central poem, “The Oak Tree,” consumes her/his three-hundred-year writing life. The biography shows Orlando continually tinkering with the poem, often in styles that mockingly reflect the cultural norms and literary styles of each epoch.⁵²

To fully appreciate the degree to which the inherent love of writing, especially poetry, dominates Orlando’s life, one must follow his/her convoluted life journey over three hundred plus years. Highlights of this fantastical adventure demonstrate that practically all of Orlando’s multiple selves and lives reveal a connection both to Vita and to writing. Moreover, several episodes are especially relevant to modernism and censorship.

The first account of Orlando’s writing life appears early in the novel. At sixteen, he wrote every day, creating tragedies and poetry, so that by age twenty he had written “no more than twenty tragedies and a dozen histories and a score of sonnets” (O, 16–24), “….for his head brimmed with rhymes and he never went to bed without striking off some conceit” (O, 28). This exuberance perhaps reflects Woolf’s own delight as she begins her tale of Vita’s life and ancestry in the style that she hoped would revolutionize biography.

However, Orlando’s zest for poetry soon becomes recklessly entangled in a fairy tale romance. In a carnivalesque setting created by the King, complete with royal pagodas and raucous crowds filled with nobles and peasants alike, Orlando encounters the captivating Russian princess Sasha during the time of the Great Frost. Sasha, mysterious and reticent about herself and her own family and romantic entanglements, causes Orlando not only to forget his place as a member of the Court but also to act “with the passion of a poet whose poetry is half pressed out of him by pain” (O, 46–47). However, Sasha appears indifferent to his verses. Soon after they meet, Orlando introduces his poetry into their courtship: “he was rattling off one of his most impressive sonnets when the Princess addresses him, ‘would you have the goodness to pass the salt?’” (O, 40). Sasha, a primary interior censor of Orlando’s poetry, flatly dismisses Orlando’s creation, and ultimately, the poet himself, in acts of rejection that would haunt the budding poet down the centuries. Predictably, Sasha breaks Orlando’s young heart and deflates the fairy tale by sailing away on a Russian ship shortly before their planned elopement.

Thus Sasha leaves Orlando alone to face the punishment for his youthful rebellion against the aristocratic societal norms and displays the undercurrent of disruption found in all fairy tales. The faithless princess not only deflates Orlando’s romantic aspirations but also costs him his high place at the Elizabethan court, as he jilts and embarrasses a prominent lady and her noble family in order to continue his quest for Sasha. Because of his love of the exotic Sasha, who demonstrates the harm that censorious friends can inflict upon a writer, Orlando also faces suppression from the authoritarian aristocracy, illustrating that men as well as women can be punished for loving the wrong person. The proto-modern Orlando thus suffers the vindictive power of the patriarchy that was still prevalent in Woolf’s own time.

The second pertinent example of censorship in Orlando’s long and varied writing career begins soon after his devastating lesson in the cost of love and spans three centuries. Now banished, Orlando retires to his country estate and, to the amazement of his faithful staff, sleeps for seven days. Upon waking and brooding darkly on Sasha’s infidelity, Orlando soon finds the antidote for the lovely face of the princess in the bright eyes of the mysterious poet, in reality Shakespeare. Thus inspired, Orlando examines the contents of his writing cabinet, which reveals his past works. Although he longs to publish his writings, he knows the disgrace such self-aggrandizement would cause a nobleman—part of Woolf’s critique of the vagaries of literature in the Renaissance. Of his many lengthy writings, the resilient Orlando chooses a “thin one, called simply ‘The Oak Tree’,” and, after some musing by Woolf upon writing and fame, he vows to become a great poet and bring immortal luster to his name (O, 77, 81).

This pledge leads him to seek the company of other writers and the near-disastrous sojourn with Nick Greene discussed above. To recover from the double treachery of Nick and Sasha, Orlando retreats to a magnificent hilltop oak tree—the inspiration for his poem—and broods that he should lead a contented life without poets or princesses (O, 97). After musing about timeless subjects such as poetry and truth, Orlando, now thirty, has an epiphany: he will only write his truth only for himself (O, 101). Thus freeing her hero, at least for a time, from the humiliating rebuke by Greene, Woolf allows the Biographer to give the reader a rare excerpt of Orlando’s verse, as he begins by comparing fame to elegant garments that only serve to restrict one’s creativity (O, 104). Realizing the floridness of his own lines (commented on with humorous derision by Woolf and/or the Biographer), he consigns them to the dustbin and, seeking consolation, returns to the actual oak tree, most noble of trees, on his vast estate. Thus restored and after experiencing several other fantastical adventures, including a change of sex, Orlando once again takes to pen and ink.

However, while the solitary Orlando, now female and living in the twentieth century, exercises her creative powers, the Biographer becomes so bored that he declares that the thus-rapt Orlando is comatose and is about to abandon his subject to the writing table, leaving the biography incomplete when Orlando pronounces her work complete (O, 271). She soon realizes, however, that although she had declared the poem finished, “The Oak Tree” is not finished with her! The manuscript begins stirring in her bosom, and, as if with a mind of its own, begins communicating with Orlando, showing over the many years a lasting connection had developed between poet and poem (O, 272). Orlando, who had lived without society while completing “The Oak Tree,” now realizes that she needs human company and hastily departs for London with the poem safely secure in her bosom.

Not recognizing modern-day London, she wanders the streets in search of the day’s “wits” until another fantasy/fairy tale character appears: Sir Nicholas (formerly Nick Greene), an influential Victorian critic (O, 277). (Note that in the twentieth century, Woolf demotes Greene from poet/artist to critic/literary wag as possible punishment for his previous treatment of Orlando and/or of Shakespeare.) After a brief conversation with the now-respectable Greene, Orlando can hardly conceal her disappointment that refined elderly gentlemen with only banal conversation were the foremost representatives of the literature of the day (O, 280). Despite Greene’s past treachery and Orlando’s suspicion of his sleek appearance, bombastic demeanor, and critique of the deplorable literary scene, she once again falls under his sway. Moreover, the poem virtually leaps from Orlando’s bosom onto the table in front of Greene, who quickly pounces on the manuscript, declaring that it must be shared with the world (O, 280). Greene immediately mentions well-known publishers and critics as the ideal gentlemen to manage the publication, review, and subsequent sales of Orlando’s work (O, 281). Note that Woolf genders the publishing establishment as male and grants Greene, who travels through time but does not undergo a change of sex, a privileged insider position within it. The officious Greene and his prominent male contacts also provide Woolf with another swipe at the closed, patriarchal world of the publishing industry that she so resented and attacked until founding her Hogarth Press. Nevertheless, Greene seemingly repays his former patron for his misdeeds in his past life by guiding “The Oak Tree” to publication. In addition, throughout the chapters involving Orlando and Greene, Woolf scatters references to fame. As a young man, Orlando sought it, vowing twice to seek fame as a poet (O, 81, 104), and he often ponders Greene’s cry “Glawr,” the poet’s pronunciation of La Gloire (O, 89). Despite Orlando’s masculine boasts, prizes and fame glorify “The Oak Tree” and its poet only after he becomes female. However as a still-young woman centuries later, Orlando exhibits an approach/avoidance relationship with the recognition of her work, as she laughs at “fame” three times when it is published and awarded prizes (O, 312). This conundrum echoes the modernist convoluted reaction to popularity that could bring writers financial rewards and other material validations of their work, but that could also cause the loss of their elite modernist standing, an issue Woolf wrestled with as her works became increasingly successful in the marketplace.⁵³

Still, this more supportive reincarnation of Greene as helpful mentor to Orlando primarily serves as Woolf’s plot device to achieve Orlando’s lifelong dream, publication and literary prizes that serve as recognition of her work, if not quite producing her oft-desired level of fame. Woolf also creates through Greene, now also an academic and an author (O, 276), a straw man for her stinging critique of Victorian literature, the university literary world, and the early-twentieth-century publishing industry that beleaguered her life. So in both the Renaissance and modern times, Greene serves as a foil to the increasingly modernist spirit of Orlando as she survives censorship/suppression throughout centuries of repressive societies.

However, the two episodes most germane to this study feature neither princess nor poet but rather involve intrusive entanglements of Orlando with the Spirit of the Age, perennial demon of both Woolf and Shaw. One interlude results in suppression of her voice until she yields to its commands; another finally grants her permission to write after an invasive inspection of her writing. Once again in London, Orlando enters yet another phase of her life as a writer. As a noble woman of some standing, she receives invitations to participate in the brilliant eighteenth-century social scene of the reign of Queen Anne. And after enduring hours of tiresome exchanges among the rich and famous, Orlando meets Alexander Pope. Joseph Addison and Jonathan Swift soon follow, fulfilling Orlando’s dream of engaging with popular writers of the day. Under their influence, she writes some pleasant prose and verses. Alas, Orlando soon discerns that their writing is better than their company and after a particularly unpleasant episode with Pope, is relieved to be alone (O, 211–14). To free her mind after her encounter with those eighteenth-century wits, Orlando once again dresses as a man, meets the group of prostitutes discussed earlier, and enjoys their amusing stories and fine tales, which help to restore her equanimity.

Soon, Orlando remembers the manuscript of “The Oak Tree,” takes it from its perpetual place in her bosom, and finds it torn and written over (O, 236). Upon perusing the first page, she discovers that the poem, begun in 1586, had been a work in progress for close to three hundred years and that it should be concluded. Upon reviewing it more closely, she discovers that “very little had changed all these years.” Her writing showed that she had been “a gloomy boy, in love with death…and then she had been amorous and florid; and then she had been sprightly and satirical; and sometimes she had tried prose and sometimes she had tried the drama. Yet …she had remained, she reflected, fundamentally the same” (O, 236–37).

As she begins her conclusion, the pen poised above the page, the interior author suffers the miserable, censorious curse of all authors: writers block! Even the extraordinarily prolific Orlando experiences that dreaded state (O, 238). However, a curse far worse soon follows: “[T]he pen began to curve and cascade with the smoothest possible fluency” and filled her sheet “with the most insipid verse she had ever read in her life.” Among the few examples of Orlando’s actual writing provided by the Biographer are these lines:Verse

Verse 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!

Repulsed by this involuntary creation, Orlando immediately covers the lines with ink to obscure them forever (O, 238). Here Woolf humorously suggests that one’s writing might sometimes escape the author’s control and that to assert her will over her own words, Orlando considers a heretofore unexpected option: marriage.⁵⁴

Orlando presently becomes aware of a strange sensation over her entire body that finally coalesces into a tingling around her ring finger, signaling, she realizes, that she must conform to the Spirit of the Age⁵⁵ and find a spouse. After reviewing and rejecting her current prospects for a mate, the dejected Orlando begins to walk, trips over heather roots, and breaks her ankle. Uncharacteristic thoughts of death begin to cloud her mind, and she concludes that the gipsie in Turkey had been right long ago when he advised her to die in peace under the open sky (O, 248–49).

The fairy tale continues when a man on horseback, Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine, suddenly appears to rescue Orlando, not only from her broken ankle but also from her supposedly unacceptable state as a single woman. After a few days of love and androgynous simpatico, Shel and Orlando intuit everything about each other to such an extent that the Biographer concludes that no language could adequately capture their courtship. Here occurs that famous blank space, an example of Woolf, through the Biographer, writing beyond words (O, 253). In keeping with the fantasy elements of Orlando, the court documents conveniently appear, clearing Orlando of any misdeeds, declaring that she is indeed alive and a woman, and restoring her considerable fortune. With these questions resolved and Shel, a ship’s captain who notes that the wind has risen, eager to begin his sailing voyage around Cape Horn, the lovers marry in a hastily organized ceremony, complete with a touch of feminist irony, Nature, in the form of thunder, obscures her pledge of obedience to her husband (O, 262). Immediately after the wedding, Shel, now the husband demanded by the Spirit of the Age, makes a well-timed departure for his ship, while Orlando, the bride, returns to her writing table. After some futile attempts at poetry, she once again encounters the Spirit of the Age hovering over her shoulder. This time it manifests itself as a literary critic, but in reality it is an enforcer seeking forbidden wares for the social purity movement that peruses Orlando’s every line:

[G]rass, the power seemed to say, going back with a ruler such as governesses use to the beginning, is all right…the snaky flower—a thought strong from a lady’s pen, perhaps…You have a husband at the Cape, you say? Ah, well, that’ll do. Orlando now performed in spirit … a deep obeisance to the spirit of her age …. 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 to pay the full fine. (O, 265–66)⁵⁶

Here Woolf acknowledges that a writer must maintain a delicate balance between her subversive ideas and the dominant mood of the era so that she may flourish as a writer, especially a woman artist who must always write while looking continually over her shoulder as well as in her heart.⁵⁷

In these two examples, Woolf, through her interior author, dramatizes the societal demands placed upon women, especially women who write. Both the “ring” and the “over-the-shoulder” episodes enact, in a fantastical but pointed way, the purity movement in its many forms as it strives to free late-Victorian and early-modern culture from the “filth” associated with sex writing, especially same-sex descriptions sometimes found in the life writing of feminist modernist women. Society’s ability to actually censor or to cause one to self-censor, even in the latter days of the purity crusade, pervades these passages of Orlando.

Thus, having made her peace with conventional society, she wrote happily at will, realizing every author’s dream of inspiration and productivity (O, 266). However, the manner in which the solitary Orlando exercises her creative powers causes the Biographer to become so bored that he declares the thus-rapt Orlando an impossibly dull subject for a biographer, and he is about to abandon his subject to her desk when Orlando declares her work complete (O, 271). After whirlwind interludes that feature childbirth and the discovery of modern shopping, Orlando, in a reflective mood, examines her many selves over time, from the young boy who battled the suspended Moor’s head in his attic room, to the young man in love with Sasha, to the Ambassador, the erstwhile gipsie, and the wife and mother. Another self reflects on her writing: “My books (here she mentioned fifty classical titles; which represented …the early romantic works that she tore up). Facile, glib, romantic” (O, 311). All these selves coalesce into the one dominant self, which Woolf constructed from Orlando’s passage through multiple eras, the evolution of the self, and the act of writing. Here Woolf works within the common language of society and yet is distanced enough from it to stress that conventional ideas about time, the individual self, and especially literary conventions are all societal constructs.⁵⁸ Yet another self exclaims, “Fame! Seven editions. A Prize. Photographs in the evening paper (here she alluded to “The Oak Tree” and the ‘Burdett Coutts’ Memorial Prize which she had won…)” (O, 312).

The Interior Author’s survey of her life centered around her literary works reflects the same kind of modernist feminist life writing that Woolf employs in her attempt to revolutionize biography. As Orlando recounts her many selves, she dwells on her writing as an integral part of the various stages of her life, with some works dismissed as trite, while others evoke warm laughter. None becomes an end in itself; rather, each is a vital link on the continuum of selves that is Orlando in 1928 (O, 311, 12). Orlando’s review thus captures, in Woolf’s terms, the “pith” and the “essence” of the recounting of her writing life (WL iv, 476). Christie Burnes asks, “what if anything constitutes Orlando’s identity” and most dominant self? She concludes that only her name, “Orlando,” truly remains the same.⁵⁹ To that I would add writing as the element of all Orlando’s selves that remains constant. Woolf concludes the novel in the present (October 11, 1928), illustrating her theory of time and of multiple selves presented in her autobiographical essay, “A Sketch of the Past” (MOB, 75). As the novel ends, Orlando, now living in the present moment is free to evolve, explore, and write about still other selves, in her seemingly endless journey through time.

Thus through the Biographer, Woolf eschews the expected literary climax of traditional biography by burying news of fame in Orlando’s winning of the “Burdett Coutts” Memorial Prize in a crowded paragraph about multiple selves. She underscores the novel’s modernist ambiguity by fashioning an open ending that represents freedom from the stifling constraints of many aspects of Woolf’s own life: traditional expectations of biography, patriarchal demands made by “the Spirit of the Age,” critics, censors, and other cultural and personal demons who are denied the opportunity to constrain Woolf’s ideas by her indefinite ending. Melanie Micir terms this open text “a hallmark of queer, feminist modernism that suggests alternatives to traditional life paths for women.”⁶⁰ Woolf concludes the novel with many unresolved questions. Does Orlando enjoy her long and fantastical life indefinitely? Will she continue to live as an independent woman once her husband returns? And, most important to this study, will our Interior Author resume her writing life? If so, what could possibly replace “The Oak Tree” in her soul and psyche? Woolf, through the Biographer, leaves these questions unanswered and instead emphasizes both “the consistency and transformation” of Orlando, the character and the poem. “The Oak Tree—actually lines from Vita’s The Land⁶¹—evolves from Jacobean tragedy to twentieth-century poetry, but the title never changes. And Orlando, through his/her long life, demonstrates that while fluctuating social forces can alter one’s perspective, human nature remains fundamentally the same” (O, 237).⁶² In “The New Biography” (WE iv, 473), Woolf identifies this seeming conundrum of capturing an individual’s “personality” while also revealing his/her “own truth” as illustrative of a major challenge faced by modern biographers. In Orlando, she attempts to solve the problem by blending fact and fiction to capture not only the aforementioned granite but also the rainbow of her character’s psyche.

Censorship

After the publication of Orlando on October 11, 1928 (WL iii, 543), Woolf enjoyed a degree of equanimity, professing her indifference to public opinion (WD iii, 200). However, while creating her novel, Woolf suffered periods of great angst and self-doubt that resulted in the harshest and most effective suppression of her revolutionary novel: self-censorship. Her diaries and letters reveal this distress, as does the novel itself. In a letter to Vita, Woolf complains about this restraint: “Millions of things I want to say can’t be said. You know why” (WL iii, 428).

Concerns about the “suppressed randiness”⁶³ of her “biography” exacerbate these doubts, which are often manifest in Orlando as a satire of the Biographer’s incompetence and forgetfulness, the social conventions of the age, or accepted literary constraints. Nevertheless, these techniques assist in creating the functional ambiguity so often found in the novel and actually provide Woolf with a mechanism to deliver veiled but impactful messages about her lifelong causes: women’s rights and sexuality, the suppression of ideas, anti-Victorian hypocrisy, the ineptness of the medical profession, and even the inequities of the publishing business.

Expressions and descriptions of a sexual nature were often difficult for Woolf, possibly because of the confusing, unwanted attention of her half-brothers, Gerald and George Duckworth in her childhood. Hermione Lee states that it is impossible to tie the brothers’ actions to Woolf’s emotional and mental problems directly, but that “Virginia herself thought that what had been done to her was very damaging.”⁶⁴ Most likely as a result of these early painful sexual experiences, Woolf, through the Biographer, often comically avoids any direct, detailed discussion of sex or eroticism—although the novel is redolent with sex. Even after the astonishing sex change undergone by Orlando, the Biographer affirms Orlando’s new gender and then immediately drops the subject (O, 139). Woolf again deftly evades explicit discussions of sex, this time among women. As Orlando and her society of prostitutes gather round the punch bowl, the Biographer maintains that they exercised complete discretion (O, 219). Even after the engagement of Shelmardine and Orlando, the Biographer yet again brings the reader to the brink of an intimate passage and promptly writes beyond words by inserting the famous blank space into Woolf’s manuscript, leaving the actual scene to the imagination. Whether this technique teases or censors, titillates or evades, it reinforces Woolf’s efforts to avoid blatant talk of sex, while referring to nothing else (O, 219).

In addition, Woolf deliberately clouds her antipathy toward Victorian society and the morality movement, which she felt had suppressed the voices of her era and her own life and work. However Orlando gloomily realizes that she must restrain her usual candor to meet the changing times and her new life as a woman. While continuing to encounter restrictions on her true self, she next confronts that ubiquitous, controlling doppelganger of polite society. The Spirit of the Age either confounds her creativity or blots her pages until she acquiesces and becomes a married woman (O, 243). Happily, Orlando magically finds just the right husband: a ship’s captain whose long absences allow her to write as she pleases. Thus Woolf/Biographer writes beyond the traditional ending for women—death or marriage—and grants Orlando both respectability and freedom, a rare combination for Woolf’s era.

One final example will serve as a more explicit illustration of the nexus between Woolf’s self-doubt and censorship. Orlando has at last reached the modern age in her long life and now writes in free verse: excerpts from Vita’s long poem, The Land (O, 265). As she writes these lines, she experiences a momentary panic about the authenticity of her verse. Here, the “Spirit” reads over her shoulder, critiquing her lines. After quibbling about word choice, the Spirit grants Orlando a “pass” because of her married status. Thus having appeased the Spirit of the Age, she wrote with great enthusiasm (O, 266). This emotional moment reflects Woolf’s own euphoria, experienced while revising sections of Mrs. Dalloway in 1924, feeling that she could write freely at last (WD ii, 323). However, “[Orlando] had only escaped by the skin of her teeth… for the transaction between a writer and the spirit of the age is one of infinite delicacy, and upon a nice arrangement between the two the whole fortune of his works depend” (O, 265–66). To achieve this balance, Woolf’s revision of Orlando shortly before publication consisted in removing blatant references to her subject’s sexuality. These deleted phrases include “the great season of Orlando’s lust,” his “red sensual lips,” and a comment on chastity being a “bore.” This self-censorship produced a more indirect yet still definitely transgressive work, as Woolf once again heeded the “circle of invisible censors” that were always manipulating her prose.⁶⁵

These would-be censors continually appear unexpectedly in Orlando: the Angel in the House, the Spirit of the Age, Nicholas Greene, Princess Sasha, even the Biographer all collude to suppress the voice of Orlando. However, Victorian censorship had become one of Woolf’s most abiding topics,⁶⁶ and she fashions these “straw men” as foils to the sanguine perseverance of Orlando to write in the manner she likes and to express some of Woolf’s most fervent beliefs.

Although cloaked in the functional ambiguity of Woolf’s modernist style, Orlando nevertheless caught the attention of the authorities. Even though Orlando was never officially censored, as were some works by Shaw, Hall, and other contemporaries, Celia Marshik reports that “Orlando came closer to government censorship than she [Woolf] realized” and that the novel’s “flirtation with obscenity” resulted in an anonymous letter of complaint, calling for the novel’s suppression, being sent to the Home Office soon after Orlando was published. Officials never acted on that complaint and the Home Office file has since disappeared.⁶⁷

Reception

Having escaped the most publicly dangerous form of censorship, Woolf’s novel still faced searing scrutiny from some reviewers and high praise from others. Arnold Bennett, Woolf’s old nemesis, writing in the Evening Standard, complained that “Orlando now dashed iridescent fragments at my feet.”⁶⁸ Granta’s critic reported “the end of Mrs. Woolf as a live force.”⁶⁹ Only slightly less harsh, J.C. Squire, writing in The Observer, opined that Orlando was “a very pleasant trifle” that would “entertain the drawing room for an hour.”⁷⁰

Still, compared to other published contemporaneous novels considered risqué or indecent (Hall’s Well was banned and Sleeveless Errand by Norah James was successfully prosecuted for obscenity⁷¹), Woolf’s “love letter” fared rather well. Lee suggests that “Orlando’s ambiguous, androgynous treatment of sexuality was received in terms of its charm, its wit, and its idiosyncrasy.” Rebecca West pronounced the novel “a poetic masterpiece of the first rank.” Desmond MacCarthy termed Orlando “pure fantasy, she [Woolf] appears to have found herself more completely than ever before.”⁷² Woolf’s own reaction to these reviews highlights her lifelong emotional struggle with popular acceptance as a writer: she longed for positive reviews but prized her individuality and the ability to create her work as she pleased.

Coming to value the opinions of friends and family over published reviews, Woolf anxiously awaited the reaction of Vita, the person for whom she wrote the novel, thinking that the world could say what they would if only Vita were pleased. Vita’s enthusiastic response to the novel “Dazzled, bewitched, enchanted,” brought an “immense relief” to Woolf, although, as she feared, a matriarch in Vita’s family condemned the work as “cruel.”⁷³ Interestingly, Vita’s husband Harold sent Virginia a most complimentary telegram two days after the publication of a work that, among other things, highlighted his wife’s affairs with women. “Orlando has filled me with amazed excitement,” he wrote. “I feel very grateful to you…for having written something so lovely and so strong” (WL iii, 548). His generous but not unexpected reaction underscores the openness of the Nicolsons’s marriage, which had become a “dedicated companionship” (Harold had male lovers and venereal disease).⁷⁴

Leonard’s opinion, always essential to Woolf, also brought great encouragement. She was enormously pleased that Leonard judged Orlando in many ways better than To The Lighthouse, more relevant to actual life (WD III, 185). Also important, as always, was the reaction of Bloomsbury. Two of Woolf’s favorites, Lytton Strachey and Roger Fry, praised the novel: Strachey, she recorded, confessed that “for the first time…he thought of me with some envy,” while she was in a “fog of ecstasy” over Roger’s praise of Orlando: “nothing has given me so much pleasure.”⁷⁵

Orlando as Modernist Writer

The question remains, is Orlando a modernist writer? Woolf included lines from Vita’s long poem The Land, written in modernist free verse, but which ones? Woolf provides Orlando with a specific passage that contains subtle references to lesbianism: “scarfed in dull purple, like Egyptian girls” (O, 265). “Egyptian girls” echo the gipsies from Orlando’s first encounter with women after becoming one herself. However, the “gipsie” reference in Vita’s poem was well known enough to invite the eye of the imaginary censor, who peeps over Orlando’s shoulder and ultimately approves of the lines because of Orlando/Vita’s status as a married woman.⁷⁶ The verse also connotes the “sapphist” status of the Woolf/Vita liaison: both were married and involved in same-sex relationships. This veiled approbation of lesbianism may be considered another rebellion against the morality movement and the conservative norms prevalent during the relationship of the two well-known writers. Ultimately, Orlando’s contemporary free verse passes the scrutiny of both Woolf’s internal censor and government censors because, in large measure, her modernist styling provided “cover” for those elements of the novel that might be considered salacious.

Also, while the reader follows Orlando’s writing career from the Elizabethan age through the Enlightenment wits to the constrictive Victorian era, the work concludes in the modern era, when Orlando proudly declares the work complete (O, 271). Accolades and prizes follow to acknowledge “The Oak Tree” as a triumph of the age, although Orlando’s “mentor,” the overbearing Nick Greene praises her poem for its lack of modernity (O, 280). However, Woolf affirms the modernist nature of the work when her Interior Author eschews fame and rewards and realizes that poetry is “a secret transaction, a voice answering a voice” (O, 325) with no need for “glawr” to affirm its worth. Woolf thus confirms the feminist modernist dictum that the subject of poetry is “a program for the conversion of the difference-between into difference-within.”⁷⁷

Biographer as Modernist Writer

Woolf creates the conservative Biographer as a “shadow character” and presents him as the novel’s Interior Author/Biographer. The Biographer’s “comically fussing over the scarcity of vital facts and information” and his mock censoring of “taboo subjects” form a subtext of the novel.⁷⁸ Through him, Woolf fashions a kind of anti-biography, one that seeks to revolutionize both the traditional biography and the societal norms surrounding “sapphist” love and other gender-related issues that often led to modern writers being censored. Thus Woolf’s “accidental modernist” Biographer, with his unwitting satire of traditional biography, dismantles the Victorian life-writing style of Woolf’s father. Accordingly, together, albeit it very different ways, both Woolf’s Interior Author and her Interior Biographer prove to be modernist writers. Orlando does so through her disregard for conventional society in order to find her own voice. She coyly but explicitly expresses her own ambisexual nature in her verse, thus defying societal norms. The Biographer, a mocking, satirical figure, employs a more cautious but humorous style to present the “suppressed randiness” found in Woolf’s love letter to Vita. This combination succeeded beyond Woolf’s expectations. In the words of Nigel Nicolson, “while Mrs. Dalloway had made her known, To the Lighthouse made her well known, Orlando made her famous.”⁷⁹

Conclusion

Woolf created Orlando not only as a tribute to Vita, but also as the embodiment of her own challenges in both her personal and writing life. The quest of Orlando to write in her own voice mirrors Woolf’s own struggle to be taken seriously by a male-dominated profession, while her desire to speak freely about identity, gender, and sexuality recalls Woolf’s own efforts to write openly without the threat of censorship.⁸⁰ Through the adventures of her Interior Author, Orlando, Woolf’s caustic pen also reinforces the seriousness of her abiding public concerns—the publishing industry, the medical profession, the patriarchy, the social purity movement—often using satire and exaggeration to reveal the struggle of genuine artists to be heard amid the din of the early twentieth century. As with Jacob Flanders and Septimus Smith, Woolf provides only fragments of Orlando’s texts, fragments that reflect the era of Orlando’s life at the time of writing. Even the lines from the prize-winning version of the much-revised poem “The Oak Tree” are from Vita’s The Land. Yet Orlando’s evolution through time—from exuberant boy to ground-breaking contemporary woman with modernist feminist sensibilities who writes what she likes and in her own voice—confirms her freedom to think and create for herself. Orlando eschews fame and world recognition but prefers to be an inner voice answering a voice, and hence a bridge to Woolf’s hallmark modernist feminist essay/novel, A Room of One’s Own. In Orlando, Woolf creates a form of life writing that explores the recording of a fantastical life as it actually might be lived,⁸¹ without the customary societal constrictions of time, gender, hypocrisy, and censorship. Thus Woolf joins Shaw in creating unusual lives by exploring alternative realities of time, gender, the self, and other unimaginable ideas, and after careful examination of these possibilities, asks “Why not?”

Between the Acts 1941

An Illusive Shadow

Woolf’s last novel, Between the Acts, features an interior author/dramatist whose work is included in the body of the novel, forming a meta-textual combination of novel and pageant. This format represents a change for Woolf, as none of her other novels presents a complete work of an interior author.⁸² Ellen Dolgin sees echoes of Shaw’s Fanny’s First Play appear throughout Woolf’s self-reflexive novel and pageant.⁸³ Although the most obvious allusion centers on the frame-play motif of each work, there are other similarities as well as significant differences, rendering a comparison of these two works even more compelling.

Both Shaw’s play and Woolf’s novel feature female interior authors who write for a primarily patriarchal audience. Both carry an ardent message of social reform: Fanny’s First Play seeks to dispel gender and class prejudices, while Miss La Trobe’s pageant in Between the Acts foregrounds equality, the foibles of history, and the urgent need for peace. In addition, the frame story in both works comments on the inner story and vice versa, as both frame and inner work emphasize the dramatic qualities of each. Lastly, both works are crafted around families: Shaw’s meta-dramatic play depicts the joys and frailties of family life, whereas Woolf’s frame story revolves around the Oliver family, while the pageant focuses on historical and contemporary aspects of a communal village, a hamlet patterned after Woolf’s Rodmell, where she spent most of her final years.

However, stark contrasts between the two works are immediately apparent, as Shaw’s nineteen-year-old Fanny comes from a privileged background with an adoring, if obtuse, father, while Miss La Trobe personifies the classic outsider, of indeterminate age and origin and identified by Woolf as lesbian. Also, unlike Shaw’s frame in which the interior play is a production unto itself, with only subtle references to the frame story, Woolf intersperses the pageant throughout the novel—between the acts—and its audience discusses the action on stage, thus influencing the reader’s response to the pageant while in progress and as a whole. In addition, Fanny comments on her only play before the critics witness it, while La Trobe mutters during the actual performance, providing a running commentary on her expectations for the production and her reaction to that of the audience. Lastly, the drama of Shaw’s Fanny, written and staged in 1911, looks toward the future with hope, creating a lively, positive attitude—even in the face of her domineering father. Thirty years later, Woolf/Miss La Trobe writes under the gloom of impending war—still longing for social change and new beginnings, but in a much darker context. While both productions contain a serious message, Fanny’s First Play maintains its comic tone throughout, while La Trobe’s pageant, despite its humorous moments, is much bleaker.

Shaw’s personal and professional connection to a leading candidate for the prototype of Miss La Trobe also contributes to his influence on Between the Acts. Scholars such as Edith Craig’s biographer, Katherine Cockin, often designate Craig (1869–1947), daughter of famed actress Ellen Terry, as a primary paradigm for La Trobe.⁸⁴ The headstrong, independent Craig, along with several of Woolf’s other friends (see below), inform her portrait of the reclusive, renegade playwright who seeks to revolutionize social values with her art. “Edy” Craig also had significant ties to Shaw, primarily through her mother but in her own right as well.

Craig’s appeal as a possible model centers on both her personal and professional life. As a lesbian who was never fully acknowledged by the overwhelmingly patriarchal theatrical community—despite a career of over thirty years as a producer, director, actor, and writer—her life mirrors the struggle of La Trobe. Craig staged numerous productions of suffrage plays, including the famous Pageant of Great Women;⁸⁵ however, her productions of three local amateur pageants “on the grounds of stately homes, abbeys, and historical buildings” in 1927 and 1935 provide the closest connection to La Trobe.⁸⁶ Julie Holledge expands the comparison: “It was not merely the external description that concurs with Edy. Through Miss La Trobe, Virginia Woolf strives towards an expression of the woman artist who uses the commonplace to create her illusion:” Scouring pads, sounds of nature “reflect the image of the audience in broken slivers of glass,” just as Edy employed everyday objects to stage her pageants. Both Woolf and Craig confront their audiences with their drama of ideas, meant to inspire reflection on their own roles in society and the need for a more just and peaceful world.⁸⁷ (Woolf’s personal relationship with Craig is described below.)

Kathleen Cockin catalogs Craig’s extensive professional relationship with Shaw: she played the original “Prossy” in the first production of Shaw’s Candida (1897); she served as theater manager for Press Cuttings (1909); and her Pioneer Players staged the (then-) infamous Mrs. Warren’s Profession (1912). “All in all,” writes Dolgin, “Craig would stage more than twenty Shaw plays by the end of the 1920s.”⁸⁸ However, other sources reveal a much more personal relationship between Shaw and Craig. When Edy was much younger, Shaw could come to Ellen Terry’s home and read his latest plays to Edy and her friends. Flirtatious letters flew between Terry and Shaw about his marrying Edy. This tangled relationship continued for years; yet ultimately, both mother and daughter became periodically wary of the other’s relationship with GBS.⁸⁹ Still, perhaps Shaw would have preferred a more personal relationship. When Terry asked Shaw to watch over Edy while both were in London during World War I, Shaw responded: “If the Germans drop bombs in London, Edie, over whom I have no control—for the fact that I adore her mother and ought to have been her father gives me no rights…. I can do nothing but offer a refuge in my extensive Adelphi cellarage, which she will not accept” (CL iii, 282–3). Eventually, the social purity movement contributed to Edy Craig’s fall from grace in London theater circles, and not even the influential Shaw could counter this decline in her career. Her ménage à trois with Christopher St. John (pseudonym of women’s suffrage campaigner Christabel Marshall) and Tony Atwood offended the theatrical elite, and the West End theater managers would not employ her, in part because of her “outsider” lifestyle.⁹⁰ Ostracized in London, Craig turned to the countryside, expanding the Little Theater movement and producing the pageants that define her legacy.⁹¹

Nevertheless, the sometimes troubled Shaw/Edy relationship continued until Edy’s death. When she died, Shaw wrote, “Gordon Craig [Edith’s brother] has made himself the most famous producer in Europe by dint of never producing anything, while Edith Craig remains the most obscure by producing everything.”⁹² These recalcitrant, work-driven traits in Craig’s personality compliment Woolf’s description of the introverted La Trobe, who “got things up” and then moved on, yet left her mark on her audiences and the theater itself. Thus, both Woolf and Shaw shared an admiration for this often-exasperating, idiosyncratic woman of the theater.

Introduction

After her earlier novel spanning three centuries, in the self-reflexive, meta-dramatic Between the Acts Woolf returns to the story of a single day, seeking once again to revolutionize the novel form. However, she packs into this one day not only a family’s drama but also an actual drama in the form of a pageant, whose content also spans three centuries, thus echoing in miniature the breadth of Orlando.

Additionally, the primary interior author of Between the Acts could be considered the opposite of the well-bred, polished, always stylish Orlando. Miss La Trobe appears “Bossy…. Her abrupt manner and stocky figure; her thick ankles and sturdy shoes; her rapid decisions barked out in guttural accents—all this got [the villagers’] goat” (BA, 46).⁹³ Also, unlike the poet Orlando, La Trobe’s art cannot be confined to a single genre; her credits include writer, producer, costumer, director—every role needed to stage a community pageant. With this production, Woolf attempts to move from the modernist “I” to the collective, late-modern “we,” as she employs her art to create awareness of the coming war.⁹⁴ The frame novel that surrounds and intersperses the pageant bears a strong resemblance to Shaw’s Heartbreak House, written some twenty-four years earlier but with the same intent: without becoming a polemical tract, the play seeks to encourage the intelligentsia (both readers and theatergoers) to recognize the dangers of and take action against the coming war. Thus war once again serves as a subtle nexus between the frame and pageant in Woolf’s final attempt to explore the connection between the patriarchy and war—to say what cannot be said⁹⁵ to a society still clinging to its Victorian values, even in the 1930s. The frame tale, as a literary device, dates to the early modern era—to Woolf’s literary hero Shakespeare—and before. With the frame novel-interior pageant motif, Woolf once again unites disparate stories much as she did in her split-subject approach to Mrs. Dalloway.

Critics relish discussing Woolf’s construction of her final novel. For example, Nicole Tabor believes the frame novel and the inner pageant are “inseparable because the pageant becomes the novel’s ‘central action,’ thus defying binary thinking much as Woolf does in the creation of the androgynous Miss La Trobe.”⁹⁶ Additionally, Penny Farfan interprets the meta-narrative structure of Between the Acts as Woolf’s attempt to demonstrate effectively how “disembodied fiction affects lived experiences.”⁹⁷ Pamela Caughie considers the varying critical responses to the frame of the novel and discerns the beginning of a postmodern phase, which may be discovered in Woolf’s artist figures: “Examined from a postmodern perspective, this structure suggests not the failure of art or its unifying role but a means of assuring its survival.” Caughie also notes that the characters who inhabit both the frame and the pageant mirror each other, as the novel’s characters, such as Isa Oliver and Mrs. Swithin, and the play’s chorus and figures representing each historical era, speak in “scraps of verse, bits of conversation … forgotten lines, and words dispersed in the wind,”⁹⁸ all recalling past customs and culture. Only Woolf’s interior author, Miss La Trobe, the consummate outsider, in her public role as writer and director, commands a singular position as a change agent. She becomes a motivating force whose script and directions drive the action of the pageant and the reaction of the audience. In La Trobe, Woolf strives to channel her rage about fascist aggression on the continent and its threat to her own way of life into art in order to expose humanity’s past transgressive ways, suggest alternate models of behavior, and bring about peace in her time.

Many of these “scraps, orts, and fragments” (BA, 138, passim) originate in Woolf’s wide reading of English literature and her abiding interest in the history of her homeland, as Lee notes that “histories of the evolution of the human race … greatly interested Virginia Woolf, and she liked to imagine paleolithic man living on the Downs” [near Rodmell].⁹⁹ Woolf harbored a lifelong desire to write such a history and, much like her fellow-modernists Eliot, Pound, and Joyce, incorporated history as a major theme in her work.¹⁰⁰ Throughout her writing, Woolf questions our notion of history itself: “what is history? is it a series of great men’s lives? who, then, determines greatness?”¹⁰¹ Woolf folded these questions into Between the Acts, thus interrogating the conventional notions of historical construction.

During this process, Woolf steeped herself in the works of English historians T.B. Macaulay and G.M. Trevelyan, and those of revisionist historian (and personal friend) Jane Harrison.¹⁰² As if acknowledging her debt to these historians, Woolf endows her frame character Mrs. Swithin with that same love of history, as she continually reads H.G. Wells’s The Outline of History throughout the novel. However, Mrs. Swithin, affectionately called “Old Flimsy” by her servants and the villagers (BA, 20, passim), is often dismissed as an out-of-touch matron with only moments of Woolfian insight, perhaps undercutting her character and the work she reads in one of the primary signals in the novel about the subversive nature of the pageant. Woolf’s complicated relationship with English history appears in the “intersubjective and intrapsychic dramas” that occur in the pageant’s interludes, disrupting the traditional historical narrative by suggesting that Pointz Hall (the earlier title of Between the Acts), the setting of both frame and pageant, is not “official England,” and that there are limits to the “English Way.”¹⁰³

The matronly Mrs. Swithin represents one of many types of women that Woolf includes in Between the Acts. Isa Oliver, mother and would-be poet, has become trapped in her husband Giles’s ancestral and patriarchal home. Additionally, Mrs. Manresa, another of Woolf’s “outsider” figures, often called a “wild child” or “wild child of nature” (BA, 30, 32), accosts the quiet country setting and its inhabitants with her unexpected entrance and brash disruption of the regular social order.¹⁰⁴ Lastly, Miss La Trobe is known to but not accepted by the villagers and the inhabitants of Pointz Hall. Although the locals express admiration for interior author, director, and producer La Trobe—for her ability to “get things up,” for being “clever,” for possessing “wonderful energy,” and for having the ability to “bring out other people’s gifts” (BA, 43)—she remains an outsider.

Taken together, these women, so different in age, interests, demeanor, and talents, form a microcosm and provide an opportunity for Woolf to critique the various roles available to women in England in the late 1930s. As Julia Briggs notes, “[Woolf] was particularly interested in the lives marginalized by the Dictionary [of National Biography edited by Woolf’s father], lives of women, of outsider, of the obscure,”¹⁰⁵ and also excluded by her grandfather James Stephen, architect of English imperialism for multiple governments.¹⁰⁶ Each of these “types” inhabits Woolf’s last novel and plays significant roles, as Woolf once again examines the effects of patriarchal society on everyday life.

The performative nature of Between the Acts, with its pacifist feminist artist, facilitates the portrayal of a realignment of the traditional gender roles that Woolf saw as “devastating in their personal, social and political consequences.”¹⁰⁷ The women of Between the Acts bear the responsibility for this transformation; however, Woolf paints a more “muted” picture of their ability to do so than in her other novels,¹⁰⁸ perhaps as a reflection of the anxious mood prevailing in England “between the acts” of two world wars. This bleak outlook and the specter of the seemingly inevitable war form the predominant theme of Between the Acts, in which Woolf attempts to link the structure of the English patriarchal family and the causes of war. Entries about war fill the pages of Woolf’s diary during these years. For example, she found a place for herself in the battle against fascism and tyranny: “Thinking is my fighting,” she writes on May 15, 1940, although her mood darkens the following day: “War is like a desperate illness” (WD v, 285).

Farfan suggests that La Trobe’s pageant, similar in message to Woolf’s anti-war polemic Three Guineas, is part of “an Outsiders-like project to undermine the patriarchy and put an end to war.”¹⁰⁹ This subversion occurs when acts of performance—theater—reveal the constructed nature of human behavior and suggest possible alternatives to belligerent impulses. Woolf sends La Trobe to “‘attack Hitler in England’ through experiments of the public art through the theater … to give England the new plot that artists desire for the whole world—peace and freedom.”¹¹⁰ Written under the continual threat of the invasion of England by Hitler’s forces, Between the Acts mobilizes the power of Woolf’s art to negate the need for air-raid shelters, gas masks, and blackouts. Her fierce belief in the necessity to wield this power renders her novel a tragicomic look at social convention as a principal cause of war—the deceptively simple heterosexual romance plot,¹¹¹ as discussed in Three Guineas. Between the Acts becomes the exemplar for her ideas on ending war, as she demonstrates the false nature of the social premises upon which human aggression—warfare—is generated and justified.

Woolf deploys her interior author, Miss La Trobe, to present the primary message of the urgent need to end war. Perhaps one of Woolf’s most complex figures,¹¹² La Trobe appears at times dictatorial, comic, tragic, admirable, coarse, and gifted. Woolf contrasts her with both the villagers and the gentry to illustrate that the individual who changes society, who can advance social causes—in this case peace—is often the “outsider,” the lone figure who carries an often unpopular message, but one that must be heard before society can evolve to a higher level, as Shaw might say—or at least keep from destroying itself.

Woolf deftly juxtaposes this emphasis on war with multifarious depictions of her love of nature, perhaps underscoring the destruction that war inflicts on the natural world she loves. Between the Acts offers examples of Woolf’s startling figures of speech comparing humans to natural creatures, thus highlighting the interdependence of humans and nature. Although she employs this technique throughout the novel, most of these metaphors and similes are found at the beginning of the book. For example, she compares the sour Mrs. Haines to a goose, while her husband and Isa Oliver become “two swans swimming downstream” (BA, 3). Yet even references to glorious nature can evoke the world’s troubles: “Here came the sun—an illimitable rapture of joy embracing every flower, every leaf. Then in compassion it withdrew, covering its face, as if it forebore to look on human suffering” (BA, 17). Thus Woolf, with her singular depiction of the bond between humankind and nature, facilitates character development while simultaneously underlining the anguished state of the world in which she lives. Her personal connection to nature is most strikingly revealed in her intertwining of nature with her characters and settings, thereby foreshadowing the depiction of Miss La Trobe as a descendant of the natural world of Anon (see p. 196).

Woolf completed Between the Acts on February 26, 1941 (WD v, 356)—approximately one month before her death—but soon felt that her meta-narrative needed serious revision, despite her previously expressed exuberant enjoyment in writing it (WD v, 327). However, although technically unfinished, Between the Acts remains one of Woolf’s most forceful pronouncements on modern society and its need to recalibrate its values, and on the manifestation of these values in contemporary English society, if that society is to survive.

Between the Acts, Modernism, and Postmodernism

Critics tracing Woolf’s evolution as a modernist writer find that Between the Acts is a fitting capstone to her modernist career, one in which her interior author, La Trobe, creates a public space where the audience can “talk, judge, and differ in the sociability that is human beings’ highest end.”¹¹³ This freedom contrasts with the authoritarian Nazi pageants taking place in Europe about the same time¹¹⁴ and underscores Woolf’s concern for her own freedom and that of her country. In the frame novel, Woolf illustrates the power of mundane, everyday life to reveal her oft-mentioned source of the bellicose nature of the Western world: the patriarchal family, long identified as a model for such social institutions as church and state. This time-honored social construct, where the law of the father must be followed unquestioningly, sets the stage for gender inequality, the suppression of individual will and dreams, and even, at times, physical violence, resulting in an emotionally charged situation where human aggression can fester, even explode. Obviously, not every male-centered family experiences this rage, but the Victorian era in which Woolf came of age was egregiously patriarchal. As a modernist, she attempts to illustrate how conventional, culturally constructed household structures are responsible for such social ills as gender and class disparity, demonstrating that these inadequate models often lead to aggression, even war.

In the frame story, the Oliver family, bound together by money and convention, becomes a microcosm for the often stifling, passive-aggressive atmosphere that surrounds even small clans. The story of the elder Olivers, the patriarchal Bart and his “unexpectedly cosmic” sister Lucy,¹¹⁵ joined by Bart’s restless son Giles and his would-be poet wife Isa and their children, is commonplace enough on the surface but becomes laden with Woolfian subterfuge as the discontent and the unrealized dreams of each character unfold. Woolf then uses the performative nature of the pageant to critique, on “a minute and daily level, how human beings [like the male Olivers] came to accept the extreme forms of nationalism and supremacist ideology.”¹¹⁶ The central characters of the frame, each longing for their own different realities, live in an atmosphere fraught with unhappiness and tension.

To this specific modernist angst, Woolf adds the fractured language that often defines the art of her era. Her deployment in both the frame and the pageant of “scraps, orts, and fragments,” quintessential stream of consciousness language, becomes both a means of expressing loneliness or “aloneness” (as in Isa’s continual repetition of bits of poetry) and as a vehicle for presenting “crowd talk.” Lee sees a connection between “crowd talk” in Jacob’s Room (Clara Durant’s party), in the eponymous Mrs. Dalloway’s party, and in the fragmented chatter in the audience of La Trobe’s pageant. For Lee, this means of group expression creates an attempt at making social events “semi-transparent,”¹¹⁷ as the audience reacts to the pageant in no coherent fashion and often to no one in particular. Franco Moretti suggests that this stream-of consciousness construction may be an attempt by individuals to cope with overstimulation of “modern” life in the early 1900s, as people began to be constantly bombarded with advertisements, actual goods and services (with the advent of the department store), and other messages all vying for the individual’s attention.¹¹⁸ I extend Moretti’s thesis to include the overstimulation of the audience by the pageant’s disjointed language and plot, as that audience becomes increasingly perplexed, searching for “the meaning” of La Trobe’s pageant. Woolf terms this bewilderment “crowd talk.”

For example, at the conclusion of the production, villagers immediately begin a cacophony of sounds and questions. In one twenty-line paragraph, Woolf’s audience discusses such diverse topics as the pageant’s budget, the need for a guide to understand the play, the Reverend Streatfield, Italy, crepe soles, and the Christian faith (BA, 142–43). The fragmented chatter continues, often at this frenetic pace, until the crowd disperses, but moments of “fellow-feeling” from their communal experience remain, as Woolf employs the fleeting elements of their common Englishness to resist the “groupthink” associated with fascist behavior.¹¹⁹ Never part of the “crowd talk” but sometimes overhearing it, the interior author is soon left alone to ponder the results of her latest production, her “gift” of art to the perplexed community.

Scholars also see Between the Acts as an integral example of Woolf’s evolving from high modernism to late or postmodernism. This shift becomes most apparent in the self-reflexive nature of both novel and pageant, as the meta-narrative in the frame develops as the characters discuss art and speak in expressions replete with quotations and scenes from English literature. The pageant features many meta-dramatic moments, little interruptions that call attention to the play but also disrupt the mood it creates, most notably as Queen Elizabeth I presents an Elizabethan masque within the play in which she is a character (BA, 64–66). In addition, the narrator offers a few admonitions to the audience while the play progresses: “don’t bother about the plot: the plot is nothing” (BA, 66). Similarly, Caughie points to the self-reflexive nature of both frame and pageant, concluding that the structure of Between the Acts reveals that literature does not seek one enduring structure but rather to show that “literature is evolving from other literature.”¹²⁰

Lastly, Jed Esty and other scholars demonstrate how Woolf, in the late 1930s and under the cloud of war, turned from the modernist “I” to the late- or postmodern “we.” Esty further posits that Woolf joined Eliot, Forster, and other modernists in employing the pageant form to affirm political as well as aesthetic ideas and to reveal Woolf’s own conflicted emotions about her English cultural and national legacy.¹²¹

Scholars often focus on the “mirror scene” (near the conclusion of the pageant) when discussing the modernist or postmodernist implications of the novel. Caughie sees La Trobe and other postmodern writers not as losing concentration or supervision of their scripts during scenes such as the audience’s moment of silent reflection, but rather interprets this as a technique to make the audience think, to show them themselves and their part in the current climate during the progression of English history.¹²² Nevertheless, Esty posits that the importance of the modernist novel “wins out” over that of the late-modernist pageant because Woolf returns to the passive-aggressive relationship of Giles and Isa Oliver at the book’s conclusion.¹²³ However, the women’s attempts at modern “soul-baring” through art when contrasted with the men’s militaristic outlook becomes a metaphor for the state of modern literature and the difficulties faced by women who write. After contrasting the writings of Isa in the frame and those of Miss La Trobe in the pageant with the childish, aggressive actions of the men, represented by Giles’s bloody shoes and Bart’s paper mask, Woolf, especially with Between the Acts, gives credence to Bonnie Kime-Scott’s thesis that little remains of “defensive male modernism after Woolf.”¹²⁴ Woolf diminishes the representatives of the patriarchy by contrasting the often immature actions of these men with the vital contributions that women’s art brings to the novel.

Characters Who Write

The act of writing once again animates the pages of Woolf’s novel. Although many characters play on words,¹²⁵ two very different women immediately become the primary authors in Between the Acts. Isa Oliver—mother, wife, and mistress of the house—constantly murmurs bits of poetry, including her own writing. With this private, self-suppressed approach to writing, Isa becomes a closet author, as contrasted with the very public interior author, Miss La Trobe, who scripts and stages the pageant for the village audience. La Trobe and Isa present what Woolf calls “Pointz Hall poetry,” the writing of which gave her so much joy (WD v, 313). Woolf entrusts these disparate women with the results of her few moments of happiness while under the menacing threats of “protracted air raids.” In their own way, both women, as we shall see, mirror the difficulties faced by Woolf’s contemporary women writers.

Isa Oliver

Isabella Oliver, introverted, trapped in a dissolving marriage while living in the ancestral home of her husband Giles, their children, and his father and aunt, seeks relief from her postmodern crisis of the self in poetry—her own and that of others. Woolf depicts Isa’s fragile emotional state as the thirty-nine-year-old woman gazes into a “three-fold mirror” in which “she could see three versions of her rather heavy yet handsome face” (BA, 10, 12), one that loves her husband as “the father of my children,” another that is devoted to her young children, and a third that harbors secret longings for the fleeting image of “the man in the grey suit.”¹²⁶ “[P]risoned by feelings of love then hate” (BA, 48), Isa becomes a closet writer, as a reflection of her self-doubt, even self-censorship (the result of her insecurity), hiding her poetry in account books, so that her insensitive husband will not see it. Woolf reinforces Isa’s fragility with references to death wishes voiced by the would-be poet: “[T]hat the water would cover me up” (BA, 75). And picking up a knife during an interval in the pageant, she quotes, “Plunge blade … Faithless! Knife, too. It broke. So too my heart” (BA, 82).

Isa continually murmurs to herself and her poetic fragments echo those of the pageant. Here Woolf deftly links Isa’s soul-bearing image to references to Shaw’s She-Ancient in Back to Methuselah and Shakespeare’s Gertrude in Hamlet,¹²⁷ again representing Woolf’s “reading self” as she calls upon her abiding love of English literature to create vivid word pictures of her own characters. Her “scraps, orts, and fragments” become “the PH poetry” (WD v, 313) and are drawn from works by such notables as Swinburne, Keats, and Shelley, as Woolf “digs and delves” into her voluminous reading of English literature, a process she affectionately terms threading a necklace through English life and literature.¹²⁸ She also frequently quotes the war poet Edward Thomas, adding a contemporary touch to her musings (BA, 211, n. 82; 233, n. 111–12). Briggs notes that “Thomas speaks to Isa’s generation as Byron had spoken to that of her father-in-law.”¹²⁹ Her murmured, fragmented lyrics must suggest a writer’s aura, as Mrs. Manresa surmises that Isa has written the pageant (BA, 44). Yet Woolf presents only glimpses of Isa’s work, recalling La Trobe’s purposely fragmented pageant that gradually disappears under the cry of the audience and in Isa’s thoughts: “What did she mean?” (BA, 155). The pageant, however, does free Isa’s mind from her scattered thoughts, so that she and William Dodge, the other “outsider” in the Olivers’s world during the one day of the novel, could have a real conversation about their own emotions and their places in the world.¹³⁰

Isa speaks, or murmurs, much of the “PH poetry” that Woolf so enjoyed writing.¹³¹ Woolf’s work as a poet-novelist adds opacity to her fiction, as its “intensity and ambiguity often taxed the limits of clarity.”¹³² Yet in this instance Isa’s lines reflect her own state of mind, as much of her poetry expresses the theme of escape, of “getting away.” Three examples will suffice:

“Where we know not, where we go not…” (BA, 11)

“To what dark antre of the unvisited earth … shall we go now?” (BA, 37)

“Let me turn away from the array of china faces…” (BA, 75)¹³³

Despite the passivity of her character and the illusiveness of the hidden verse, Isa, Woolf’s closet writer, and Miss La Trobe, her public playwright, share the last aesthetic moments of Between the Acts. Shortly after La Trobe is inspired to begin writing her next production, Isa seemingly intuitively suggests a change: “Love and hate … surely it was time someone invented a new plot” (BA, 155). Kime-Scott reasons that the merging of these two kinds of “women’s art may be [Woolf’s] final contribution to late modernism.” In any event, Isa, with her children, household, and in-laws to serve, becomes another of Woolf’s meditations on the difficulties confronting women writers.¹³⁴

Anon and Miss LaTrobe

Virginia Woolf alternated writing her last novel with recording ideas for the next, “Anon” (WD v, 340). Here she considered the “economic, political, cultural, and personal forces that influences a writer,” using her amusing terms “Nin, Crot, and Pulley,” to describe the role of these forces in shaping both the singer and the song over time.¹³⁵ In this beautiful short sketch of the beginning of cultural life in England, Woolf traces the first wordless singer, whose nonverbal songs imitated those of birds and evolved into early language, ultimately concluding with the death of the singer Anon, “killed by the printing press and by the resulting censorship of his words.”¹³⁶ This short essay is important to the present study for three reasons. The “little language” Woolf calls for in “Anon” and her Writer’s Diary recalls a time before words became so encumbered with clouded, often multiple meanings as to become almost useless in Woolf’s eyes.¹³⁷ La Trobe employs a version of this “little language,” sung by the villagers in Between the Acts, as they “dig and delve” their intrusion into the pageant, and may be traced back to pre-Chaucerian England. Also, as the life-course of the legendary singer evolves, “culture” develops, although Woolf questions the value of these “advances.” She shows exactly when the voice of Anon is extinguished by that “progress,” when the printing press gives rise to individual authorship. The other characters in the novel, the villagers and inhabitants of Pointz Hall, appear passive when contrasted with La Trobe’s initiative as creator and producer of the only real action in Between the Acts, once again illustrating that writing can be a metaphor for action in the works of both Shaw and Woolf. La Trobe remains resilient in the face of criticism and censorship by the audience and the community, in sharp contrast to her “mirror” character, Isa in the frame portion of the novel, who harbors a secret death wish. Moreover, in her art La Trobe assumes a firm stance against war, while Giles, the other character most concerned with war, only fumes silently, acting out his own aggressions by lamely stomping on a frog.

La Trobe appears enigmatic possibly because Woolf creates her as a multifaceted character, a composite of a number of Woolf’s friends and acquaintances, many of them writers. Jane Marcus contends that what these women have in common is a “swashbuckling English eccentric spinster style” that suggests a “universal” Miss La Trobe.¹³⁸ As noted above, scholars mention Edy Craig, whose work at the subscription-based “The Barn” theater Woolf admired and hoped to support by subscribing to its productions (WL 5, 225), as well as Woolf’s friend, the composer Ethyl Smyth, as the most likely models for La Trobe. However, other notable candidates include her contemporaries Lilian Baylis, founder and manager of the Old Vic, the writer Radclyffe Hall and her long-time lesbian partner the sculptor and translator Una Troubridge, and even Vita Sackville-West.¹³⁹

As Woolf’s only consistently female interior author, La Trobe becomes Woolf’s tribute to women writers, especially those “swashbuckling buccaneers.” She also represents Anon, returned from the ancient green world of the minstrel or troubadour, who taught people about their past and facilitated the establishment of their cultural history through old songs, lauds, and rhymes.¹⁴⁰ Reborn in Between the Acts, La Trobe “takes up Anon’s part, urging her audience to shed their habitual names and words and anonymously join in a life together.”¹⁴¹ As an artist, her pageant exemplifies her contribution to her own community and demonstrates the artist’s role in facilitating that communal spirit. The pacifist feminist La Trobe “represents a positive alternative to masculine domination and leadership, as she becomes a background figure, a prompter and catalyst rather than director and guide,” who, although often mocked and ignored by that community, is recognized as an “outsider” and allowed to continue her life within it.¹⁴² However, in Three Guineas the label “outsider” becomes a badge of honor bestowed on those who would disrupt the patriarchy’s damaging hold on English society. The pageant serves as “an outsider-like project to undermine the patriarchy and put an end to war.”¹⁴³ La Trobe cares passionately about her art; wounded but undeterred by criticism, rejection, and what she considers failure, she also experiences the gratification of momentarily connecting with her audience, causing them to consider their own lives and to ponder “the meaning” of the pageant after its conclusion. For these creative accomplishments, Woolf gifts her with the artist’s singular reward: the idea for another performance (BA, 151, 153).

After considering Woolf’s concerns for the limits of “the English way,” Esty contends that “La Trobe’s wary and self-reflexive show generates a metafictional commentary on the novel’s own covert ritual function … that the pageant plot gives Woolf a chance to meditate openly about her own purpose and effects as a writer and to come to terms with the social limits of high-modernist literary institutions.”¹⁴⁴ While this perspective is valid, Woolf also demonstrates that her interior author performs a larger role than simply acting as a “surrogate” or “stand in” for Woolf’s musings on her artistic form.¹⁴⁵ La Trobe’s character demonstrates the full process of creating art, from the lonely moments of inception through scripting, producing, and directing her own creative vision, a meta-narrative on the entire spectrum of the artistic process, including difficult moments of self-doubt, even self-censorship. Although La Trobe’s problems with staging the pageant become almost comic, she reveals that these doubts and difficulties are not obstacles but motivating factors.¹⁴⁶ For the true interior author is scripted as a generator of ideas, producing, in this case, what Woolf recognized as an evolutionary reality in “Anon,” “a theater of the brain.”¹⁴⁷

Pageant

Woolf launches La Trobe and her pageant to impart her message of revolt against the patriarchal values that lead to war and often to censorship. “La Trobe’s anti-nationalistic pageant deviates from popular Empire Day pageants of the day by surveying English history through its literature … rather than national or military events.”¹⁴⁸ Through La Trobe, her modern-day minstrel, Woolf recalls the history of England to reveal how the missteps along the way have led to the aggression, repression, and domination that she senses in everyday English life. Between the Acts, in effect, becomes Woolf’s own attempt at writing the history that fascinated her and that she continued to read through English poetry and culture instead of the lives of great men and accounts of major battles. To accomplish this revision of the pageant genre and the English canon itself, Woolf invests La Trobe with methods similar to those of Anon: both credit anonymous singers as the originators of English literature; both rely on androgynous figures to deliver the communal songs out of doors; and both prominently feature nature. However, the most consistent distraction is the panoramic view surrounding Pointz Hall. Described as “green yellow, blue yellow, red yellow, then blue again” (BA, 49), the view becomes as repetitious as the references to its distraction in both frame and pageant. Thus, Nature, designated here as simply “the view,” is not always La Trobe’s ally, as the surroundings of Pointz Hall become so mesmerizing that they almost eclipse her production. At one point, she becomes so disillusioned with the play that she must resist the temptation “to let the view triumph” (BA, 49). During an interval, La Trobe senses that the view has stolen her audience, as they gaze at nature’s creation instead of the actors. Here Woolf offers another implied reference to the timeless tension between nature and art, as her love for the English countryside almost derails the production of her interior author.

These comic elements coalesce to satirize the traditional English pageant popularized by Louis Napoleon Parker and other writers in the 1930s.¹⁴⁹ La Trobe portrays the Elizabethan, Restoration, and Victorian historical periods by presenting vignettes that she had combined using works of each era. For example, Woolf’s play in the Age of Reason episode appears to be a conglomeration of Restoration comedies: William Congreve’s The Way of the World, Oliver Goldsmith’s The Good Natured Man, and William Wycherley’s Love in the Woods.¹⁵⁰ These time-worn pieces, readily familiar to the audience, call attention to what Kime-Scott terms “the limited number of plots and themes recycled in the history of literature—the lost prince, the marriage arranged for financial motive, and the white man’s burden of authority … from empire to family.”¹⁵¹

Yet McWhirter reminds us that the combination of history, the tragic implications of war, and human foibles render Between the Acts a tragicomedy “a crazy quilt of discursive forms” rather than confined to a single genre, detailing the lives of individuals during the complicated eras that Woolf included in the pageant.¹⁵² La Trobe portrays the “grandeur of an era” via the trappings of theater: costumes, props, and script. Rather than present the actual script for each vignette, Woolf evokes them through these theatrical elements, while sounding a modernist dissonant note. Yet she also valorizes the memory of Anon and the communal spirit while demonstrating her love of language and tales. The pageant could have been a mock epic except for what Woolf purposefully omits, which is as telling as what she includes. The obvious exclusion of military parades, battles, and grand national celebrations, as noted by Colonel Mayhew and his wife in the audience (BA, 113, 142), underscores Woolf’s subversion of militaristic England and continues her portrayal of the machinery and language of war as patriarchal constructs.¹⁵³

As in her other novels, Woolf’s use of repetition serves to reinforce not only her message of peace and equality but also other matters central to the novel. For example, the “digging and delving” of the Chaucerian chorus may be a Woolfian comment on her own writing processes and those of her interior author as she sifts through English literature, tales, and ballads for the appropriate lines to include in her last novel. Similarly, this process could echo the ever-present censor—officials, literary critics, wags—who were continually scrutinizing her work and who haunted her as she wrote. Also, the repetition of the chorus calls attention to both the passing of time and to its endurance. Mark Hussey glosses “scraps, orts, and fragments” as one of several references to Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida (BA xlv, 29, 87, 100, 101,135, 138), much as Woolf had referenced Cymbeline in Mrs. Dalloway. However, rather than a marker of mental distress (as in her previous novel), these lines become a tribute to Anon’s green world and further connect La Trobe, through her repeated use of these words, with the minstrel and his/her fellows who “shared the emotions of Anon’s song” and “linked the anonymous elements in writer and in audience” to reveal the historical process through which a more sophisticated form of human expression developed.¹⁵⁴ Woolf plays with words, from those unspoken to those with multiple meanings, to heighten their impact on the audience.¹⁵⁵ In addition, “disbursed we are” (BA, 69), continually repeated by the gramophone, applies not only to the intervals of the pageant but also to the disjointed state of the community surrounding Pointz Hall and, by extension, to the population of England itself. Woolf often pairs “dispersity” with “unity” (BA, 138, passim); however, “dispersity” becomes both a frequently repeated word in the novel and a description of the mood of the audience. Woolf’s concern for this lack of communal spirit was especially important for the troubled nation about to enter the labyrinth of war.

The chant of the chorus, especially their oft-repeated words and phrases, presents a primary example of Woolf’s experimentation with her longed-for “little language,” unencumbered by present-day meanings and distorted representations. After a lifetime of “playing with words,” Woolf continually references this desired unfettered talk in Between the Acts.¹⁵⁶ In the pageant, the little language degenerates even farther as Woolf, through “The Voice” at the conclusion of La Trobe’s play, asserts the following: “Let’s talk in words of one syllable, without larding, stuffing or cant … and calmly consider ourselves” (BA, 134). Also in the frame, Woolf reprises the value of simple language as La Trobe sits alone after the pageant, listening while “words of one syllable sank down into the mud … the mud become fertile” (BA, 152). Eisenberg connects La Trobe’s thoughts to the “old mother-world and its fertile old chants” and suggests that Woolf saw this old, little language as a “cure” for the world’s ills caused by patriarchal language and its aggressive, destructive tendencies.¹⁵⁷

Audience Reaction

Caughie stresses that both Orlando and La Trobe need an audience to present their interpretation of history and of themselves. She also mentions that in Between the Acts, the audience becomes more important than in any other Woolf novel.¹⁵⁸ Leaska reports that Woolf feared that the war had diverted her audience’s attention from fiction to the current crises on the continent. Her concern that she had no audience increased the anxiety she experienced from 1936 until her death.¹⁵⁹ Yet by weaving the audience response to the play within its loosely written script, Woolf foregrounds the postmodern notion of the “death of the author” as the audience serves as “co-authors” of the play.¹⁶⁰ Many voices add their own version of English history and literature, as Bart exhorts “Reason” (BA, 87, 96); Col. and Mrs. Mayhew call for the appearance of the British Army (BA, 113); and Isa repeatedly calls for an ending, especially her own (BA, 129–30).

Woolf provides a range of the audience’s comments during the play’s intervals. Most repeat some version of “What was in [La Trobe’s] mind” or “What did [the pageant] mean?” (BA, 127, 53) as they puzzle over what they had witnessed. Some admit that the work was ambitious; however, choruses of “all that fuss over nothing” and “such an outrage; such an insult” were also heard (BA, 60, 153, 100, 131). In Woolf’s earlier typescript of “Pointz Hall,” audience member Mrs. Parker comments on the names of characters in the next scene, as Bart Oliver suggests that Miss La Trobe only follows current practices of creating “houmours, not characters…. That’s why the drama’s impossible now. We’re too mixed. Oh but take Ibsen. But after Ibsen? Well, there’s Shaw…. That proves my case…. Shaw’s only humorous. It’s not an age for drama….”¹⁶¹ Interestingly, Woolf did not include the derogatory reference to Shaw in future transcripts or in her last version of the novel.

Nevertheless, some glimmers of communal understanding also emerge: “So that was her little game! To show us up as we are, here and now” (BA, 133). Woolf also records the reaction of one audience member, Mrs. Lynn Jones, as she initially protests about omissions in the pageant, then recognizes the veracity of the Victorian scene, and finally reexamines her beliefs as “Home, Sweet Home” plays. This process follows that of “resistance, recognition and reconsideration” found in several of Woolf’s theatrical reviews.¹⁶² Yet the play leaves an impression: the audience thinks about whether people really change. Isa reacts by stating simply, “The play keeps running in my head” (BA, 76). The often harsh comments, some of which La Trobe does not hear, reveal the extent of the impact of her lines on the audience. But La Trobe’s self-doubt, like that of her author, keeps her from comprehending the full influence of her “gift” to the audience. Ever the resilient artist, despite misgivings, she soon feels and then hears the stirrings of another play.

Censorship

“I have been thinking about the censors. How visionary figures admonish us,” Woolf wrote in 1939 while finishing Between the Acts (WD v, 229). These thoughts naturally pervade her last¹⁶³ novel, both in the frame story and pageant, as well as at the beginning of “Anon,” where Woolf identifies the first instances of censorship as the minstrel evolves over time into the writer. The writer can be identified by his/her audience, and this connection results in a “barrier between the sayable and the unsayable.”¹⁶⁴ Hussey reports that “the boundary between words of the pageant and the words and thoughts of the audience is permeable,” giving Woolf the opportunity to explore multiple levels of narration to sound similar themes from multiple perspectives.¹⁶⁵ From trivial conversation to major components of the pageant, Woolf considers the various forms of censorship, always in ways that support the individual’s right to speak in her/his own voice.

For example, in the frame, several characters attempt to suppress the speech of other characters or of themselves. Mrs. Haines twice rejects discussions of the community cesspool (BA, 3–4, 5). Giles’s hostile attitude condemns the Pointz Hall party for their banal discussions of the view of the English countryside when war is imminent (BA, 40). Bart repeatedly denies his sister’s religious views while bolstering his own affirmation of reason, as juxtaposed with her visionary spirit (BA, 147–48). And the villagers censor La Trobe as not of their kind, a pariah of sorts, although her leadership and artistic talents prove indispensable to their much-anticipated annual pageant.

In addition, self-censorship pervades the pages of the frame. Giles refrains from calling William a derogatory term for “homosexual” although his wife instantly apprehends his thoughts (BA, 44); Isa suppresses her own verses by hiding them from her husband for fear he would belittle her work (BA, 11, 36); and even the brash Manresa self-censors an old joke about a lavatory to keep from offending Mrs. Swithin (BA, 74). This stifling air of suppression of one’s thoughts and words supports Woolf’s broader theme of censorship in the pageant.

Also in the play, La Trobe illustrates what she believes to be “the suppressed subtext” of English literature. Her audience, in turn, censors her omission of what they regard as “authentic history.”¹⁶⁶ In subverting these eras in England’s past (discussed above on page 204), La Trobe offers her own public plea for peace, similar to the private one affirmed by Isa in the frame (BA, 67), which in her mind includes gender equality, freedom to speak in one’s own voice, and release from England’s militaristic and imperial past. This desire for an all-encompassing peace leads to La Trobe’s omission in the pageant of all military action and most direct references to war. Similarly, the absence of “great men” story lines evokes a call to include women’s contributions in the story of England’s past.

Woolf’s subversive ideas, hidden in the old lauds, poems, ballads, and tales, comprise much of Woolf/La Trobe’s message, and expose the flaws of patriarchal nationalism while embracing the Englishness of the poetry that Woolf held so dear. For example, while celebrating the Age of Reason, represented by the villager Mable Hopkins as Queen Anne, as one of peace and abundant commerce, Woolf inserts a passing reference to the people at the origin of this abundance, the “savage” who sweats in “the distant mines” (BA, 89–90). She makes the same point again in the Victorian Age, as Budge the policeman makes a more blatant reference to the oppression of Empire: “Let ’em sweat at the mines; cough at the looms” (BA, 117). Thus, Woolf reminds her readers that England’s peace and prosperity in those eras of colonial imperialism were made possible by the toil of all those subjugated under British rule during the supposed heyday of the British Empire. In these ways, censorship pervades the pages of Between the Acts, continuing Woolf’s plea to free individuals from both overt and covert suppression of thought and word. Her interior author, Miss La Trobe, thus becomes both the primary target of censorship as well as the means to eliminate suppression itself.

Doubt and Self-Doubt

Because La Trobe’s underlying meaning in Between the Acts is so subtly woven into these popular images of “England,” her audience often fails to grasp her intended reform of English society. To wit, Isa, one of the more perceptive attendees, muses, “There were such a medley of things going on … [in] the confusion of the plot that she could make nothing of it” (BA, 66). Reactions such as this from the audience invariably reach La Trobe, causing her continual doubt about her artistic powers (BA 71, 88, 101, 129, 150), more so than in any other of Woolf’s representations of the artist figure.¹⁶⁷ This absence of faith in her own words mirrors that of her creator, as Woolf eventually came to question her own artistic vision in her last novel (WL v. 6, 482, 486).¹⁶⁸ She admitted that although she was fond of “Pointz Hall” and savored her time spent conceiving and writing the novel, she doubted if anyone would like it or take the time to read it (WD v, 160).

Failure of Words

The language of both frame and pageant references the degree to which words can be both hurtful and ineffective, reinforcing La Trobe’s misgivings about her work. In the first scene of the pageant featuring England in its infancy, the words of young Phyllis Jones “peppered the audience with a shower of hard stones” in a manner that created distance between audience and actor (BA, 57). Part of the chants of the chorus becomes irrelevant as the narrator again offers a negative interpretation of the value of language: “It didn’t matter what the words were, or who sang them” (BA, 68). Similarly, the words of the pageant are often inaudible, and in his summation of the puzzling play, Reverend Streatfield simply has no use for words (BA, 101, 139). In her unhappiness after her pageant, Isa shreds a leaf of Old Man’s Beard because no words grew to relieve her troubled mood (BA, 149). This refrain of empty, hurtful words continues throughout the novel and the pageant until La Trobe experiences her epiphany while sitting alone at the bar: “Words of one syllable … wonderful words … the first words: of her next play” (BA, 152–53). Woolf’s fertile words represent the artist’s reward—as previously noted, the only compensation her interior author can have: the idea for her next work.

War

The strained mood of much of Between the Acts and its interior play may be attributed in part to the reality of impending war during its creation and to the many references to war in both pageant and frame. In the pageant, while war itself is never depicted, the cacophony of sound that pervades the pageant often mimics the explosions of battle. The blaring gramophone that bleats songs, messages, and instructions, as well as the bullhorn used by La Trobe herself, evoke not only militaristic action but also illustrate how the constant repetition of words and phrases and the rhyme and rhythm of patriarchal messages can control crowds with fascist intent. Also, La Trobe’s use of noise distorts the meaning of the patriotic script, questioning the values inscribed therein.¹⁶⁹ La Trobe herself is described as a “commander,” “an admiral” who often carries a whip, while her actors are her “little troops” (BA, 44, 42, 46). Thus, in references to writers and directors as dictators over their own plots, Woolf portrays her own messenger of peace in bellicose terms. In addition, she endows the keeper of Victorian peace, Budge the policeman, with a chest full of medals and self-important language about the “rule of his truncheon,” a weapon of war in miniature (BA, 116). More pointedly, during the Reverend Streatfield’s concluding remarks, twelve airplanes intrude upon the assembly and overpower the voice of the representative of the church (BA, 138). Also, Isa dwells on the young woman brutally raped by the Whitehall Guards, in a reminder of the violence often associated with the military (BA, 15, 155). As mentioned earlier, Woolf/La Trobe purposefully refrains from including those powerful emblems of war, England’s renowned military and the grand national assembly, in the pageant, thereby denying some in the audience the reassurance of England’s ability to protect itself from invasion. Instead, Patricia Joplin states that “Woolf was never more sophisticated and terrifying as a writer than in this work …. La Trobe’s creative violence, unlike a German bomb, leaves the beautiful house and setting intact—and attacks only the static violence, the little, local acts of domination it represents.”¹⁷⁰

Additionally, the pageant’s reminiscences about the past (supposed) glories of England inevitably lead to thoughts of the future. With its porous margins between frame and play, the pageant itself is interspersed with perhaps the most poignant references to war. However, as the audience muses about what they witness on stage, bleak comments about the lack of a future because of the war also recur: Isa repeats, “This year, last year, next year, never” (BA, 154).¹⁷¹ Mrs. Swithin reminds her brother that they have no future time: “We’ve only the present” (BA, 60). The narrator’s ominous lines consider their possible fate, “The future shadowed their present, like the many-veined transparent vine leaf; a criss-cross of lines making no pattern” a future life (BA, 83). Thus, both the frame and the pageant remain open-ended; no closure can be afforded to the characters of either. Responding to Woolf’s illusiveness, a reader could surmise that any one of three “authors” could write the ending of the frame: the narrator unites Isa and Giles as lovers, rendering a “heart of darkness” patriarchal ending; Isa longs for a “new part” for herself; and Miss La Trobe plans a new play with cave dwellers possibly watching the scene between Isa and Giles.¹⁷² Marcus contends that La Trobe plans to rewrite Genesis but extends that authorship question farther by asking if another writer could emerge “from the bushes” with a different plot—one featuring neither the frame nor the pageant characters¹⁷³—to add another discussion of a possible, more promising future for the human race.

Indeed, the war so dominated the thoughts and actions of Woolf and her contemporaries that there was little time for anything else—whether at Rodmell or in London. Fear of possible invasion formed the pattern for Woolf’s daily life, including her writing. Despite her many long-time friends and contacts, the war isolated Virginia and Leonard Woolf not only physically but also in Woolf’s beliefs about the war. The famed Bloomsbury group argued about war, art, and politics, and most were no longer pacifists, one of the few tenets of their original, if informal, creed. Many in the group were “slightly embarrassed” by Woolf’s Three Guineas and its fierce anti-war stance.¹⁷⁴ By the time Between the Acts was completed, Woolf was so ideologically isolated that her friends, even her own husband, did not grasp the full intent of her last novel.¹⁷⁵ Thus out of sync with her long-trusted allies, Woolf’s cherished solitude became a form of mental isolation.¹⁷⁶ During her last days, Woolf at times felt “everyone had vanished.”¹⁷⁷ As a result, she did not share her drafts of Between the Acts with others, as she had done with previous novels. Ultimately both Leonard and their Hogarth Press partner John Lehmann were the last readers of Between the Acts prior to its publication, and both were positive about the book, with Leonard ranking it among her best works.¹⁷⁸

Critical Reception

Between the Acts was published by the Hogarth Press months after Woolf’s death with an inserted message by Leonard explaining the circumstances of publication and noting that while revisions would certainly have been made by Woolf, the manuscript was largely complete.¹⁷⁹ There followed what Lee terms “respectful reviews,” mostly describing in slightly derogatory terms Woolf’s “delicate and sensitive mind” during the writing of her last novel.¹⁸⁰ Uncertain about Woolf’s lasting reputation after the reception of Three Guineas, critics also began to question the novel’s merit as a work of literature. For example, F.R. Leavis doubted one would recognize the novel as Woolf’s without her name on the cover. Louis Kronenberger considered it “a retreat from life.” Eventually, more favorable reviews appeared. The poet Edwin Muir surmised that Woolf “had never written better prose than the prose in this last book.” Elizabeth Bowen praised the work for its new combination of elements, a variety that she had come to expect in Woolf’s novels.¹⁸¹ Briggs notes that postmodern criticism reveals a fuller dimension to Woolf’s work, with its self-consciousness, skepticism, and mimicry, and best serves to illuminate Woolf’s continual search for “newer ways of expressing herself.”¹⁸² More recently, modernist feminist criticism has recognized the importance of Woolf’s novels, including Between the Acts, and has employed Woolf’s work and her emphasis on feminism, socialism, and pacifism in the movement’s intellectual transformation of higher education and literary criticism.¹⁸³ Led by Jane Marcus and others, gender studies also began a fuller appreciation of Woolf’s novel of reform, with its call for gender acceptance and equality and, above all, peace.

Conclusion

In April 1940, the women of Woolf’s village requested that Woolf “get up” a pageant for presentation in Rodmell. While charmed by their invitation, Woolf declined (WL v. 6, 391). However, instead of actually producing or directing a pageant, she immortalized the idea by writing a novel that featured such a production and included composite sketches of many of the villagers.¹⁸⁴ Perhaps partially because of her affection for the little village, Woolf enjoyed creating Between the Acts as a fanciful break during the completion of her fact-laden biography of her friend Roger Fry. In her diary, she frequently equates her new novel with pleasure and even describes herself as “triumphant,” employing what she termed an “interesting new method” to create her book (WD v, 327, 340).¹⁸⁵ Possibly this contentment derived, in part, from the open-ended nature of her last novel, which juxtaposed the threat of war with the possibilities of new life.¹⁸⁶ As “Woolf celebrates rather than mourns the impossibility of a final meaning,” she also suggests that art can cultivate a communal spirit, even in the face of war.¹⁸⁷ She invests in her interior author La Trobe the will to rise above what on some levels seemed failure, to feel the power of art stir within her and the desire to continue on her creative path. In La Trobe, Woolf’s enigmatic, eccentric outsider with special affinities to the minstrel Anon, Woolf fashions a tribute to women artists and the vagaries of their craft, especially writers who struggle to create under the yoke of a patriarchal, nationalistic society that valorized “great men.” Her last novel calls for a return to a simpler time when the voices of artists, like that of Anon, could be heard. Between the Acts remains more accessible (and indeed comical) than Woolf’s previous novels, creating an empathy with the writer and her interior author, Miss La Trobe.