Orlando Read Online Free Page B

fact Strachey himself who helped spark Woolf’s desire to write a novel in the form of a parodic biography. Commenting on
Mrs. Dalloway,
Strachey proposed to Woolf that perhaps she should write a book with a ‘wilder and more fantastic’ structure than anything she had heretofore attempted, a ‘framework that admits of anything, like
Tristram Shandy’.
24 But the nature of the history that Woolf did ‘take’ as both structure and subject was far more subversive than anything Strachey had in mind. For while, in such volumes as
Eminent
Victorians
and
Queen Victoria,
Strachey did ridicule the pomposities of the late nineteenth century, he still preserved the contours of traditional history and biography. Setting himself against the patriotic proprieties of the Victorian establishment, he almost always acquiesced in the subtler pieties of the masculinist Cambridge to which he himself remained loyal. Woolf, however, produced a new kind of record – an exuberant account of a life which, though apparently lived on the edge of patriarchal history, nevertheless appropriates and transforms that history.
    Just as Woolf’s paradoxical decision that
Orlando
should be ‘truthful but fantastic’ accurately summarizes her vision of the gender transformation at the heart of the book, the phrase also offers an appropriate description of the narrative/historical enterprise she undertook as she embarked on this ‘writer’s holiday’. For the Lord/Lady Orlando is a nobleperson whom we first encounter as a young man in the sixteenth century, follow through the courts of Elizabeth I and Charles II to an ambassadorship in Turkey where
he
becomes a
she,
meet again living the life of a literary lady aristocrat in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England, and finally see when she has become a prize-winning author in ‘the present moment’ of aeroplanes and motor-cars. Certainly, in the free-flying sweep and scope with which it wings over the gravities of history, this life goes beyond even the fantastic, Shandyan parameters Strachey prescribed. Yet at the same time, it is, as Woolf insisted, ‘truthful’ – truthful because it is true to Woolf’s ongoing effort to reimagine history, and truthful because it is true to her developing vision of the secret psychological realities that shape even the most liberated woman’s life.
    Like Vita Sackville-West – and like Virginia Woolf herself – Orlando seems to have been born into a central and privileged position in society. At the same time, like both Woolf and Vita, he/she is always a kind of outsider, and even, from a conventional point of view, mad (
furioso
), like his/her literary ancestor, Ariosto’s
Orlando Furioso.
25 By rank a nobleman, he has ‘a liking for low company, especially for that of lettered people’, and even whenhe is more or less adopted by the great Queen Elizabeth, he has little enthusiasm for the doings of the court. During the timeless time of the Great Frost, when London seems to hang suspended on the ice of an eternal moment, he falls in love with the androgynous Sasha, a Russian Princess for whom he ‘want[s] another landscape and another tongue’, a place and a language outside the public English history that is forming all around him. When Sasha sails away in the flood of time that suddenly breaks up the ice, Orlando retreats to his country estate to become a writer, but even in the world of letters he is still an outsider. Gulled and galled by the literary impresario Nick Greene, he is haunted but mystified by the enigmatic face of Shakespeare and feels that no battle in which his ancestors fought was ‘half so arduous as this which he now undertook to win immortality against the English language’ (p. 57).
    Again, as the English ambassador to Constantinople and, then, the ex-ambassadress living
al fresco
among a band of gypsies, Orlando never quite fits in. In the first case,
he
alarms the English by making a disreputable marriage to one