“Anyone moderately familiar with the rigours of composition will not need to be told the story in detail how he wrote and it seemed good read and it seemed vile corrected and tore up cut out put in was in ecstasy in despair had his good nights and bad mornings snatched at ideas and lost them saw his book plain before him and it vanished acted people’s parts as he ate mouthed them as he walked now cried now laughed vacillated between this style and that now preferred the heroic and pompous next the plain and simple now the vales of Tempe then the fields of Kent or Cornwall and could not decide whether he was the divinest genius or the greatest fool in the world.” And who better to lay it out? Woolf knew it, in all of its self-doubt and contradiction, all too well.
And embedded in a raucous adventure story masquerading as biography, we find Woolf is documenting nothing other than the life of a writer, long before we as a culture spent countless words analyzing said life. A boy who despite his position, finds himself perpetually shifting between emotional extremes, riding high on life only to fall into the depths of despair.
A solitary wanderer, an amateur poet, royalty.
Orlando (and Woolf’s subversive writing style, in all of its breaking of the fourth wall and sly jabs at the dominant male voices of the age) was a modernist before his time. Could there be a more exhilirating account of the writer’s life?įrom the opening line Woolf announces the freewheeling narrative style she intends to adopt in her whimsical, slightly off “biography” of the Elizabethan aristocrat Orlando (a stand-in for Woolf’s lover Vita Sackville-West) who is constrained by nothing: not time, or sex, or tradition, in a majestic critique of biography, fact, and societal “norms.”
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