Orlando Read Online Free Page A

done by a range of real women historians in the earlytwentieth century, some of whose writings – for instance, Eileen Power’s
Medieval People
(1924) – she would later read, but some of whose scholarship – for example, Mary Beard’s
Woman as a Force in History
(1946) – she would not live to know.
    When the Bloomsbury novelist first began to address the ‘tiresomeness’ of conventional male-dominated history, such feminist projects were virtually non-existent, even in her circle of radical intellectuals. Indeed, as late as 1921, the American historian Arthur Schlesinger had observed that
    If the silence of historians is taken to mean anything, it would appear that one half of our population have been negligible factors in our country’s history. Before accepting the truth of this assumption, the facts of our history need to be raked over from a new point of view. It should not be forgotten… that all of our great historians have been men and were likely therefore to be influenced by a sex interpretation of history all the more potent because unconscious. 20
    Though she may never have encountered Schlesinger’s statement, Woolf was to echo it shortly after completing
Orlando
: in
A Room of One’s Own
she remarked acerbically that ‘It was certainly an odd monster that one made up by reading the historians’ [views of women] first, and the poets’ afterwards – a worm winged like an eagle; the spirit of life and beauty in a kitchen chopping up suet.’ To remedy the situation, she suggested that the students of Newnham and Girton ‘should re-write history’, for, she noted ironically, ‘it often seems a little queer as it is, unreal, lop-sided’. 21
    Although she produced a number of essays on women’s past and on female literary traditions that attempted just such re-writings, Woolf’s most sustained attempts at historical revision paradoxically took the form of novels. In her view, as she explained in the ‘novel-essay’
The Pargiters,
which was the germ of her late novel-history
The Years
(1937), ‘it would be far easier to write history [than fiction but] that method of telling the truth seems to me so elementary, and so clumsy, that I prefer, where truth isimportant, to write fiction.’ 22 And this was a preference to which, from the start of her writing career, she had consistently clung.
    Thus, as a history of the transformed and transforming self which criticizes standard histories and biographies at the same time that it proposes the possibility of an alternative life,
Orlando
is not an unprecedented work in Woolf’s canon. In
The Voyage Out,
the arrogant St John Hirst finds it impossible to imagine that Rachel Vinrace has ‘reached the age of twenty-four without reading Gibbon’. In
Jacob’s Room
(1922), the form of biography encloses an absent subject – a mysterious young man ‘over whom’ we ‘hang vibrating’. In
To the Lighthouse,
when ‘Time Passes’, major public events are related only parenthetically while an unidentified narrator describes the assaults of nature on the Ramsays’ summer house, and then focuses on the restorative labours of two obscure cleaning women. Throughout these books (and others) Woolf persistently explored the mystifying relationship between the ineffable essence of human reality and the deceptive, usually patriarchal, substance of written records. By the time she came to compose her ‘love letter’ to Vita Sackville-West, therefore, she was ready not only for what she called ‘an escapade’ but also for the creation of what Leon Edel has seen as ‘a fully-fledged theory of biography’, formulated, now, not only in reaction to her father’s ideas but perhaps also in response to the theories of such modernist contemporaries as Lytton Strachey, the flamboyant debunker of
Eminent Victorians,
and Harold Nicolson, the author of a treatise on biography that was to be published in 1928 by her own Hogarth Press. 23
    In Edel’s view, it was in