FAQ: Orlando

Composition

Updated July 31, 1998
Created July 31, 1998

What were the circumstances of writing Orlando?

Woolf wrote Orlando very quickly, beginning it in October 1927, when she described it in her diary as "a biography beginning in the year 1500 & continuing to the present day, called Orlando: Vita; only with a change about from one sex to another" (October 5, 1927). The diary indicates she initially thought to finish it by Christmas. She had finished it by March 1928, when she wrote in her diary that "I have written this book quicker than any: & it is all a joke; & yet gay & quick reading I think; a writers holiday."—(Diary, Sunday 18 March 1928). That May, she wrote the lectures she would give at the Cambridge women’s colleges in the fall, and later revise as A Room of One’s Own (1929).

She interrupted work on "Phases of Fiction" to write Orlando. "Phases," an analysis of various fiction writers in terms of her own theory of fiction, was eventually published in the American periodical Bookman in 1929, and later reprinted in the posthumous essay collection Granite and Rainbow (1958). Much of what Woolf writes about Orlando and writing reflects her own views on writing, such as the need to write only to please oneself (which VW did from age 40), and the view that one must lead a contemplative life to be a serious writer.

The month after Orlando was published, Woolf wrote in her diary: "Well but Orlando was the outcome of a perfectly definite, indeed overmastering impulse. I want fun. I want fantasy. I want (& this was serious) to give things their caricature value. ... My notion is that there are offices to be discharged by talent for the relief of genius: meaning that one has the play side; the gift when it is mere gift, unapplied gift; & the gift when it is serious, going to business. And one relieves the other."—(Diary, Wednesday 7 November 1928)

When writing Orlando, Woolf’s relationship with Vita Sackville-West was well past its peak (they first met in December 1922), and Woolf was aware that Vita had embarked on an amour with Mary Campbell. Reid describes Woolf’s writing Orlando as in part an attempt to reclaim Vita (310), and the book did bring them together a good deal, researching details about the Sackville-Wests and arranging photographs for the book.

Works Cited

      

  Back to Virginia Woolf Seminar Home Page