Orlando
Page 31
Nothing so true as what you once let fall,
Most women have no Characters at all.
Pope’s treatment of Orlando is reminiscent of Nick Greene’s in Chapter II.
46. the plain Dunstable of the matter: a phrase meaning ‘in plain language’, deriving from the very straight road from London to Dunstable. Woolf would have found it spoken by a maidservant in Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa (1748).
47. women… each other’s society: the sense of women speaking to one another behind closed doors is also strong in Woolf’s next book, A Room of One’s Own (1928; Penguin Books, 1945, especially Chapter V). Vita’s cousin Edward Sackville-West complained to Virginia that ‘Mr S.W.’, quoted in this passage, referred to him, especially as a reference to Orlando’s cousin appears on the following page, where her poems are mistakenly attributed to him (Edward Sackville-West also wrote poetry). Woolf wrote back to him mendaciously, accord ing to Nicolson, ‘Mr. S.W. was (if anybody) Sydney Waterlow. How could it have been you?’ (21 November 1928, Letters, III, p. 559).
48. and clip the nut trees: Harold Nicolson had planted nut trees at Long Barn. Orlando’s night wanderings dressed as a man parallel Vita’s (Vita, pp. 83, 95, 99).
49. a duel… followed them: in 1920 Vita had run away with Violet Trefusis to Amiens, pursued by both their husbands (Nicolson; and Vita, p. 108).
50. shadows’ names: Samuel Johnson (1709–84), poet, lexicographer and man of letters, was the major literary figure of the second half of the eighteenth century; James Boswell (1740–95) was his friend and biographer; the blind Mrs Williams was a member of Johnson’s household. Joshua Reynolds’s portrait of Samuel Johnson (1769) hung in the Reynolds Room (Phillips, II, p. 419).
51. light, order and serenity: Woolf characterizes the age of Enlightenment, contrasting it on the one hand with the violence of Elizabethan England and on the other with the approaching clouds of the nineteenth century.
CHAPTER V
1. the constitution of England was altered: both in the narrow sense — that is, the principles according to which a state is governed were changed – and, more loosely, in the sense that the character or nature of England changed.
2. the brothers Adam: eighteenth-century architects and interior design ers whose style was characterized by neo-classical elegance.
3. muffin… and the crumpet: two different kinds of cake, usually eaten at tea-time, toasted and with butter.
4. obfuse green: to obfuscate is to darken or obscure. In the MS this sentence is followed by a description of the Squire’s chill and his desire to cover everything in sight: ‘to muffle, to conceal, now became the chief pursuit of the educated classes’.
5. British Empire… existence: i.e. in order to accommodate the superflu ous population.
6. scrolloping: see Chapter II, Note 32; the threatening vegetation recalls that of Andrew Marvell’s ‘The Garden’.
7. ramid, hecatomb, or trophy: the statue of Queen Victoria outside Buckingham Palace was put up in 1911. In its place Woolf imagines a kind of funeral pyre (a hecatomb is a huge public sacrifice) of Victoriana, including: the Queen’s own widow’s weeds, worn since Prince Albert’s death in 1861; crystal palaces, alluding to the one built for the Great Exhibition in 1851; bassinettes, i.e. wicker baby-prams; military helmets, suggestive of the Empire; Christmas trees, introduced to England by Prince Albert; and ‘extinct monsters, globes, maps’, suggesting the discovery of dinosaurs as well as of far-off countries. The female figure may be Chastity, or an ideal of womanhood such as ‘The Angel in the House’ (see ‘Professions for Women’, CE, II, pp. 285–6); the gentleman is the Victorian patri arch, dressed in the fashion of his day. The royal family were famous both for their domesticity and their bad taste.
8. crinoline: a wide-hooped petticoat.
9. Elizabeth… to princes?: these words are usually supposed to have been spoken by the dying Elizabeth to Lord Burghley’s son, Robert Cecil: ‘Little man, little man! thy father, if he had been alive, durst not have used that word.’
10. bombasine: a heavy dress material made from wool and silk; black bombazine was regularly used for mourning – ‘widow’s weeds’.
11. 86… three hundred years now: 1586 is probably the year Orlando opens (the chronology in Knole gives this as the year Sackville received the house from Elizabeth, though 1566 is the date given in the text). Vita took six years to write her poem ‘The Land’ (‘The Oak Tree’), and Virginia mocked her for it, according to Nicolson. At this point, the MS includes a long account of Orlando’s search for her writing self: she returns to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, citing lines from Thomas Sackville’s ‘Induction’ to the Mirror for Magistrates and Charles Sackville’s lyric, ‘Tell me, Dorinda, why so gay’, in an effort to overcome her writer’s block and negotiate the unsympathetic spirit of the age.
12. caracole… her life: curves and caracoles are graceful manoeuvres made on horseback. The verses that follow parody the drearier verse of the period.
13. pinchbeck: an alloy resembling gold.
14. indissolubly linked together: this image of marriage may derive from Shelley’s ‘Epipsychidion’ (1821), where it is figured as
[…] the beaten road
Which those poor slaves with weary footsteps tread
[…] and so
The dreariest and the longest journey go.
These lines provided the tide of E. M. Forster’s second novel, The Longest Journey (1907).
15. Lord Melbourne: Queen Victoria’s first prime minister, often pictured announcing her accession to the eighteen-year-old Queen.
16. lachrymose … mellifluous fluencies: lachrymose means tearful; melli fluous fluencies are honey-sweet flowings or effusions.
17. the Archduke… Botany Bay: Lord Lascelles had married Princess Mary, the Princess Royal, in 1922; Botany Bay is the place in Australia where British convicts were sent for punishment.
18. Canute and Pippin: Orlando’s (and Vita’s) elk-hound and spaniel.
19. the moor… Six feathers: this scene is inspired by Emily Bronte’s novel Wuthering Heights (1847), in which the heroine, Catherine, loves the moor and its wild birds (in delirium she pulls the feathers out of her pillow, naming the birds they come from). Woolf in cluded an essay on ‘Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights’ in The Common Reader (1925) (reprinted in CE, I, pp. 185–90).
20. Sir Bedivere… Arthur: this episode forms the climax of Tennyson’s poem ‘Morte d’Arthur’ (1842), later incorporated into his Idylls of the King (1869).
21. Armada … Nelson: the Spanish Armada was defeated in 1588; Lord Nelson fought the French and Spanish at sea, being killed at Trafalgar in 1805. This wide historical sweep parallels the book’s geographical panoramas.
22. a man on horseback: this scene recalls, while reversing, the first encounter between Jane Eyre and Mr Rochester in Charlotte Bronte’s novel, jane Eyre (1847). Out walking, Jane is overtaken by a rider whose horse slips on some ice so that he sprains his ankle in the fall. Her first words to him are: ‘Are you injured, sir?’ (I, Chapter XII.)
23. Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine, Esquire: a romantic version of Harold Nicolson. Vita’s pet (family) name was ‘Mar’, and she sometimes referred to herself and Harold as ‘the mars’, thus Marmaduke. A woman called Shelmerdene appears in Michael Arlen’s novel These Charming People (1923), having, like Harold, ‘returned to England after a long absence abroad in Persia’. Harold, like ‘Shel’, had ancestors from Skye, was comparatively poor, had actually sailed round the Horn and frequently had to live abroad, since he was in the diplomatic service (Nicolson).
24. brig: a two-masted, square-rigged sailing vessel.
25. Peelers: policemen, named after Sir Robert Peel who established the London police force in 1829. Several of his letters relating to the Battle of Waterloo are quoted in Knole (pp. 208–14).
26. the estates… Palmerston’s: desequestrated, i.e. released from being held in chancery, where Orlando’s estate
s had been for the duration of the trial; tailed and entailed, i.e. settled as the inalienable pos session of her and her heirs; Lord Palmerston was prime minister from 1855–65.
27. the whole town… rejoicings: after the Sackvilles won the 1910 ‘Pepita’ case, all Sevenoaks turned out to celebrate (Nicolson; and Vita, p. 35). Barouches and landaus are different kinds of four-wheeled carriages and The Bull and The Stag are pubs in Sevenoaks. Vita remembered leaving the car for a carriage at the top of the hill; when they reached Sevenoaks itself, the horse was taken out of the traces and the carriage pulled through the main street all the way to Knole itself, amidst a cheering crowd (Vita Sackville-West, Pepita, 1937, pp. 227–9).
28. the castle… Gladstone: the castle is Windsor Castle; W. E. Gladstone was yet another of Victoria’s prime ministers, this time in the later part of her reign.
29. parenthesis… Orlando’s life: Woolf is again parodying her own previous novel To the Lighthouse, in which the deaths of several of the main characters are enclosed in square brackets to mark them off from the rest of the text.
30. top-boom mizzen… larboard: nautical terms – Marmaduke explains to Orlando how various sails and spars are adjusted in the process of sailing. Starboard is the right-hand side of the ship when facing forwards, larboard (now usually referred to as ‘port’) is the left.
31. Pascal: Blaise Pascal (1623–62), French religious philosopher.
32. Bishop Berkeley: (1685–1753) Irish philosopher who believed that matter only existed in so far as it was perceived.
33. Lady Derby: Lady Mary Sackville-West, Vita’s great aunt, married Lord Derby, an eminent Victorian statesman (Knole, p. 180).
34. a ship in full sail… sails quivering: this passage, with its sudden transpositions, is strongly reminiscent of De Quincey, and, in par ticular, the three-decker in summer seas, bearing down on a little pinnace, in ‘Dream Fugue’ in ‘The English Mail Coach’ (1849).
35. they reached the Chapel: Vita married Harold Nicolson on 1 October 1913 in the chapel at Knole (Nicolson; and Vita, p. 61). Orlando’s marriage takes place during a thunderstorm (see Knole, p. 17: ‘The chapel looks strange and lovely during a midnight thunderstorm: the lightning flashes through the stone ogives of the east window…’). The thunder conveniently drowns out the moment in the wedding ceremony when the bride promises to obey the bride groom. Woolf associated the image of the bird dashed against the glass with passion – see, for example, Night and Day (1919; Penguin Books, 1992, p. 334).
CHAPTER VI
1. And then… girls: these four lines are from the ‘Spring’ section of Vita’s poem The Land (1926, p. 49). The fritillaries are ‘snaky’ be cause of their spotted heads – this variety is also known as ‘snake’s head fritillary’. The presence of the Egyptian girls, implying the desire of women for women, disturbs the narrative and is smuggled in as an item of contraband past the literary censors of the age.
2. the Hogarth Press: begun by Leonard and Virginia in 1917, the Hogarth Press published a variety of modern writing, including Virginia’s own.
3. the poet: Lord Byron wrote in Don Juan (Canto I, stanza 194):
Man’s love is of his life a thing apart,
’Tis woman’s whole existence.
George Sackville, fourth Duke of Dorset (1794–1815), had known Byron at school (Knole, pp. 203–5).
4. think of a gamekeeper: as Lady Chatterley does in D. H. Lawrence’s novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover, published in Florence in 1928 and read by Vita in July (Vita, p. 199). Woolf must have known of it by reputation earlier that year, since the gamekeeper also appears in the MS. The male novelist who defines love as ‘slipping off one’s petticoat and —’ also suggests Lawrence.
5. Let us go, then…: the writer’s visible inertia is contrasted with the activity of nature, which is celebrated in rhyme. Vita was later to include this passage in her anthology of poetry Another World Than This (1945, p. 131), in which she also published for the first time Charles Elton’s ‘Luriana, Lurilee’, recited at the dinner party in To the Lighthouse (1927; Penguin Books, 1992, pp. 120–21).
6. another in Mayfair: in 1907 Vita’s mother bought a house in Hill Street, off Berkeley Square (Nicolson; and Vita, p. 23), where Vita often used to stay.
7. Sir Nicholas!: Nick Greene has changed with the times, becoming ‘the most influential critic of the Victorian age’, a pillar of the establishment who takes tea with duchesses (see p. 195). Vita wrote to Harold on 11 October 1928: ‘Nicholas Greene you will recognize as [Edmund] Gosse’ (Vita, p. 202). A year earlier, Virginia had gone to hear Vita read a lecture chaired by Gosse:
She was fawned upon by the little dapper grocer Gosse who kept spinning round on his heel to address her compliments … & to be drawing round the lot of them thicker and thicker, the red plush curtains of respectability. There was Vita, who was too innocent to see it … I dont regret my wildest, foolishest, utterance, if it gave the least crack to this respectability.
(30 October 1926, Diary, III, p. 115.)
Gosse wrote a regular column for the Sunday Times and it is here that Orlando reads his article on John Donne (see p. 198). Woolf wrote an essay on ‘Edmund Gosse’ in 1931 (CE, IV, pp. 81–7).
8. Addison’s Cato… Thomson’s Seasons: Addison’s Cato (1713) is a neo-classical tragedy. Thomson’s Seasons (1726–30) is a long four-part nature poem, anticipating The land in structure.
9. royalties… Messrs. —: Sir Nicholas is referring to the proportion of the cost of a book paid to the author for every copy sold. Vita’s The Land was actually her fourth book to be published by William Heinemann (who had previously published Knole and the Sackvilles).
10. a cypher language: while Harold was in Tehran (from November 1925 to May 1927), he and Vita sent each other telegrams in a cypher called ‘unicode’ (Nicolson). The code itself (e.g. ‘Rattigan Glumphoboo’) is indecipherable, but might be a parody of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, sections of which were published from 1922 on wards as Work in Progress.
11. the Duke of Hamilton… Lord Mohun: Hyde Park had often been the setting for duels. Knole has portraits of the second Marquis of Hamilton in the Great Hall and one of a Major Michael Mohun, a noted duellist, in the Poets’ Parlour (Phillips, II, pp. 416, 441).
12. the Serpentine: an artificial lake that runs through the centre of Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens. As a child, Woolf walked twice a day in Kensington Gardens and often sailed boats on the Serpentine or the Round Pond. In ‘A Sketch of the Past’ she recalls her boat sailing to the middle of the pond and suddenly sinking (Moments of Being, p. 86).
13. tight scarlet trousers… two dogs dancing: the red trousers belong to a guardsman; the dogs on their hind legs recall Dr Johnson’s notorious comparison: ‘A woman’s preaching is like a dog’s walking on his hinder legs. It is not done well: but you are surprised to find it done at all.’ These overtones of militarism and misogyny may explain Orlando’s sense that as a woman she could not write about them in the same way as the essayists Addison or Charles Lamb would have done: ‘one must never, never say what one thought’.
14. Tapper said about Smiles: two minor Victorian writers — Martin Tupper wrote facile verses (‘pretentious twaddle’), while Samuel Smiles preached the smug doctrine of self-help.
15. eight-hour bills… factory acts: Victorian legislation to limit the hours in a working day.
16. four-in-hand… barouche landau: different types of carriages.
17. four great names: Tennyson and Browning, Charles Dickens and George Eliot. The names that follow all belong to genuine and identifiable, but mainly minor, poets, writers and historians of the Victorian age. At this point, the MS includes a much longer account of the differences between Victorian literature and its antecedents, and, in particular, of the way in which writing has been gentrified and professionalized — far more books are now published and many of them are ‘not books pure and simple but books about books’. Orlando goes to hear Sir Nicholas lecturing on t
he Romantic poets and is almost suffocated (see above, Note 7). As writers grow more respectable, patrons are no longer sought after: Christina Rossettiturns down an invitation to tea. Lady A. takes Orlando to see Carlyle but is chased away by his wife: ‘Be off with you, fool!… I’d have you know my Thomas is asleep.’ They visit Tennyson at Freshwater, only to be intercepted by Emily in her wheelchair, who prevents them reaching the house: ‘My husband is writing a poem.’ Writers are now ‘enclosed in a sound-proof room and protected by a wife’. Volumnia Fox (Virginia Woolf) is now only remembered because Arnold Bennett once devoted half an hour to demolishing this poor scribbler: ‘She would have been forgotten anyhow, and the half hour spent on her might have given us another of his master pieces.’
18. Miss Christina Rossetti: (1830–94) an intense and highly individual poet, the subject of Woolf’s 1930 essay ‘I am Christina Rossetti’ (CE, IV, pp. 54–60). Poetic patronage has changed since Dryden’s day (see p. 147).
19. Suddenly she started… barrel organ: here, as earlier in the novel, changes in the life of the body become occasions of anxiety and disturbance within the text: the next event befalling Orlando, while apparent to the footman and the maid-servant, cannot easily be announced. The narration is interrupted first by the sound of the barrel-organ, then thoughts of Kew Gardens (where the lives of the plants were associated, for Woolf, with the rhythms of the body – see Chapter XXV of Night and Day, 1919), and then by a series of exclamations which recall, without exactly quoting, Milton’s lines:
Hail wedded Love, mysterious Law, true source
Of human offspring…
(Paradise Lost, Book 4, lines 750–51.)
20. their outrigger: a light rowing boat (they seem to be on the river at Kew).
21. a son… 20th: Vita had two sons, Ben and Nigel; when they asked which of them this was supposed to be, Woolf replied, ‘Both of you’ (Nicolson). Neither was born on 20 March, though this date is suggestively close to 17 March (1928), when Woolf completed Orlando (see letter to Vita, 20 March 1928, Letters, III, p. 474; and Note 39, below); it had been begun the previous October (like the bulbs, ‘thrust into the earth in October’, at Kew, p. 203).