Virginia Woolf's Orlando

“At any rate, it was not until she felt the coil of skirts about her legs and the Captain offered, with the greatest politeness, to have an awning spread for her on deck, that she realised with a start the penalties and privileges of her position.”

Virginia Woolf, Orlando

SALON DETAILS:

I have worked with many of Virginia Woolf’s texts, and each one leaves me breathless with its narrative beauty, unique aesthetic and remarkable understanding of the depths of the human mind. Orlando is relatively new territory for me: is it an ironic biography, or possibly a love letter to Vita Sackville-West, or perhaps imagined autobiography? Critics disagree on how to categorise this book – which makes it all the more intriguing.

The proposal of Virginia Woolf as a comic genius is not how we usually consider this writer of such depth and nuance. In Orlando, Woolf seeks to probe the limits of gender, but this was before gender was understood to be a social construct. She was, as always, ahead of her time.

The central character survives centuries and emulates Tiresias (the blind prophet of Thebes who was transformed into a woman for seven years and then back into a man). By changing genders, Orlando is given the unique ability to compare what it is to be male and what it is to be female. As always, reading this work and participating in the discussions that are inevitably provoked – around gender, same-sex love, societal constraints and the search for joy across historical epochs – will illuminate the chaotic world we live in, where gender continues to be problematised and re-considered.

Virginia Woolf and other members of the bohemian Bloomsbury Group often escaped London to retreat to the rural beauty of the Sussex Downs and the Weald of Kent, ultimately moving there and developing an artistic community. Vita Sackville-West lived at Knole, her ancestral home, and then at Sissinghurst Castle which she bought with her husband, Harold Nicolson, with whom she created what would become one of England’s best-loved gardens. Vita and Virginia shared their love of these open spaces and grand homes saturated in history. Our visit to Knole House will provide an opportunity to understand the traditions and opulence of Vita’s world, as well as her sense of loss when Knole was passed to the male heir.

“Memory is the seamstress, and a capricious one at that. Memory runs her needle in and out, up and down, hither and thither. We know not what comes next, or what follows after. Thus, the most ordinary movement in the world, such as sitting down at a table and pulling the inkstand towards one, may agitate a thousand odd, disconnected fragments, now bright, now dim, hanging and bobbing and dipping and flaunting, like the underlinen of a family of fourteen on a line in a gale of wind.”

Virginia Woolf, Orlando

• Facilitated by Toby Brothers
• Six meeting virtual study, 13 October – 17 November 2022, 4.30-6.30pm (UK time)
• Cost £180, includes notes and critical resources
• Recommended edition: Orlando by Virginia Woolf, Vintage Classics (October 2016)
  ISBN-10: 1784870854
• Optional informal Saturday trip to Knole House (the ancestral home of Vita Sackville-West) to enjoy the art and the palatial house and grounds. This is NOT a formally organized guided tour, but a self-guided gathering at Knole (40 minutes by train from Waterloo, followed by a 10 minute bus or taxi journey) with an opportunity to discuss and share readings from the recently published Love Letters of Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West (Vintage 2021). Knole is owned and run by the National Trust and has informed and enthusiastic guides in each room to fill-in the history and stories of the Sackville-West family.