FAQ: Orlando

Biographical References

Updated October 16, 2000
Created July 31, 1998

Does Woolf base any characters in Orlando on real people?

Orlando - Orlando is based on Vita Sackville-West, the woman whom Lee describes as "the central relationship of [Woolf’s] forties" (515). Orlando’s life traces the history of Vita Sackville-West’s family, up to the present day, when Vita was unable to inherit her family estate because she was a woman. Most of the photographs are of Vita or members of her family (see key to illustrations) . Orlando is age 36 at the end of the book, Vita’s age in 1928. [Note, Orlando is age 30 when he becomes a woman; Vita was 30 when she met Virginia; when Virginia was 30, she married Leonard]. However, Lee corrects a too-simple identification of Vita and Orlando:

"Vita’s class, her ancestral house, her looks, her sensuality, her resistance to convention, her travels, her unusual marriage her writing: all that is in the ‘biography.’ It is a knowing, loving, private message. . . . [Yet it also parodies Vita and is in some ways cruel.] Vita is made love to, but she is also made over; her characteristics are exploited. Where Vita was romantic, private and gloomy, Orlando is showy, glittering, witty and camp. . . . Where Vita’s taste is conservative and snobbish, Orlando is anarchic and socially unsettling. Orlando’s (and Orlando’s) feminism is—of course—much more Virginia Woolf’s than Vita’s" (516).

Sasha - based on Violet Trefusis, with whom Vita had a widely publicized fling in 1918-20 (their husband flew to Paris to bring them back. For different versions, see Vita’s novel Challenge (1923; suppressed in U.K.) and Nigel Nicolson’s account in Portrait of a Marriage (1973).

Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine - mostly a fantasy character (his photo in the book is from an anonymous man), but with resemblances to Vita’s husband, Harold Nicolson. Orlando calls Shelmerdine by the the same pet name Vita used for Harold, "Mar."  Like Nicolson, Shelmerdine is away most of the time, and once Nicolson landed at Knole in an airplane. (That's his photo at left.)

Archduke Harry - based on Henry, Lord Lascelles (1882-1974), one of Vita’s suitors.

Works Cited

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