nf0062: if you have been looking at the the web site newsgroup you would have 
realized that last week's lecture had been changed round because namex namex 
had to be somewhere else today and so i agreed to swap with him which was er 
just as well given that i went down with the flu er so those of you who read 
the newsgroup will have known that if you didn't there's a good reason for 
keeping up with the newsgroup because bits of information like that do get 
relayed er and i've not put on the handout details of the books i'm referring 
to but they are there on the newsgroup so again another incentive to go and use 
it it saves my time i only have to do it once and send it rather than start f-, 
copying more paper okay er so i'm going to be lecturing on Orlando Orlando A 
Biography today and i'm going to concentrate on three main aspects today the 
biographical aspect the whole issue of parody and issues about er relationship 
to history and in 
fact i had hoped to do more than that and i think i'm not going to have time to 
do more than that in an hour so i'm going to as it were hold over part of my 
agenda till next term when i lecture on modernism and gender and i shall talk 
in more detail next term about the issues around Orlando's sex change and 
issues of er identity sexual identity and the whole issue of the self whatever 
that is so today is going to be as it were part one of my approaches to Orlando 
and i'm going to start with the biographical whatever that means er Virginia 
Woolf was born in eighteen-eighty-two the third of four children from the 
marriage of Leslie and Julia Stephen both parents had been married previously 
so the household also included two elder half-brothers George and Gerald 
Duckworth and two half-sisters Stella Duckworth and Leslie Stephen's daughter 
by his first marriage called Laura and if you're interested in biography behind 
that plain statement there's an awful lot of possibly 
relevant information which i won't go into now but i would recommend Hermione 
Lee's biography of Virginia Woolf simply called Virginia Woolf which came out 
last year to great critical acclaim now as children er the family lived in Hyde 
Park Gate which is a narrow cul-de-sac off Kensington Road and spent the 
summers at Talland House just outside Saint Ives in Cornwall and if you've read 
To the Lighthouse you'll know that that is a kind of er r-, recall a memoir of 
of Talland House in fictional form er Virginia Woolf's mother died in eighteen-
ninety-five when well she was then Virginia Stephen when Virginia Stephen was 
thirteen and just between childhood and adolescence in her memoirs she 
describes it thus the years between childhood and maturity are so complex my 
mother's death fell into the very middle of that amorphous time that made it 
much more broken the whole thing was strained her father Leslie Stephen was the 
first editor of The Dictionary of 
National Biography which is mentioned in Orlando er and Hermione Lee explains 
what it involved for him she says Leslie may have been anxious for Julia's 
health but he was exhausting her the most in the year of Virginia's birth he 
was labouring with a different kind of gestation the Cornhill Magazine was 
flagging and the publisher George Smith suggested that Leslie give up the 
editorship in order to embark on The Dictionary of National Biography from then 
on for nine years he committed himself to the massive undertaking of 
marshalling a team of six-hundred-and-fifty-three contributors editing the 
articles of the first twenty-six volumes writing three-hundred-and-seventy-
eight entries himself endlessly proof correcting not his forte and 
corresponding by the end there would be sixty-three volumes of twenty-nine-
thousand-one-hundred-and-twenty lines a monument to Victorian industry a tomb 
for Leslie Stephen's health the first volume came out in 
eighteen-eighty-five already it seems to have been perceived by the children as 
a blight Toby at five bought Leslie a contradictionary box which Toby said was 
full of rubbish [sniff] so i start with these biographical details because one 
could argue that all of Virginia Woolf's writing is based on her autobiography 
or what she describes as life writing again as Hermione Lee says her life story 
enters and shapes her novels and her essays she returns again and again to her 
family her parents her sister the death of her mother the death of her brother 
[sniff] now in the case of Orlando A Biography the biography is not of Virginia 
Woolf but of Vita Sackville-West with whom Virginia Woolf had what one could 
describe as an affair er in the twenties they first met at the end of nineteen-
twenty-two introduced by Virginia's brother-in-law Clive Bell Vita was married 
to Harold Nicolson in a 
marriage which permitted them both to continue homosexual affairs and liaisons 
the affair with Virginia Woolf lasted through most of the nineteen-twenties and 
included their going on holiday to France together towards the end of that time 
Orlando was written towards the end of the affair and can be seen as Virginia's 
way of saying farewell and taking possession of her own agendas again it's 
based on Vita Sackville-West but there are many elements in the novel which 
derive from Virginia Woolf rather than Sackville-West for example feminism the 
preoccupation with the impossibility of writing history and writing biography 
and the whole way in which the concept of a stable unified self is dissolved in 
the text on the other hand there's clearly a fascination with an aristocratic 
family whose lineage stretched back to Elizabethan times er and with the whole 
notion of the ancestral family home and arguably well i'm not 
quite sure how strongly i'd want to argue the case there's also a critique of 
some of the values which the English aristocracy subscribe to so i want to 
approach the text first of all thr-, through this notion of its being a 
biography and it's there in the subtitle of the novel er and in fact it caused 
some confusion when it was first published because it wasn't put in kind of the 
fiction section in bookshops but in the biography section er so it's a 
biography a life writing and remember that Vita's name in Latin means life er 
and of course it's still present in words like vital vitality er and even if 
you don't know Latin you may know the Latin tag er [sniff] ars longa vita 
brevis yes long the art short the life the life is long the art i-, the sorry 
the the art is long the life is short i think comes from Horace er so part of 
Virginia Woolf's playfulness in this text is that we have a kind of a variation 
on this theme of ars longa vita brevis we have ars longa vita longa as well to 
kind of correspond to it er i'm going to quote from Rachel Bowlby's 
introduction to Orlando which some of you might have in your edition but not 
sure that everybody does s-, since she gives a clear and succinct account of 
Vita and again you'll see on the newsgroup that you can also go to Feminist 
Destinations where that essay is reprinted er [sniff] so Bowlby says Vita was 
the latest in a line of the noble Sackvilles whose history she had lovingly 
written a few years before Orlando in Knole and the Sackvilles nineteen-twenty-
two on which Woolf drew extensively for her background to the novel she took 
upon herself the conserving role of historian and prided herself on the 
continuity and illustriousness of her ancestry since the sixteenth century when 
one of them was granted the estate by Queen Elizabeth the First the Sackvilles 
had consistently been men of 
national importance they made up a long run of statesmen ambassadors and minor 
men of letters and it is not difficult to imagine how Vita herself the wife of 
a twentieth century ambassador Harold Nicolson and a prolific seeker after 
literary fame should have found both points of correspondence in this history 
and for the two must be inseparable been prompted in the choices of her own 
life by the models provided by her extraordinary array of forebears so many of 
the incidents in the plot of Orlando are based on the history of the Sackville 
family which had been written by Vita and which arguably influenced her in her 
own life choices and for example the whole incident o-, of er the living with 
the gypsies Vita Sackwille-Welf w-, er West's grandmother was a quite famous 
Spanish gypsy dancer er [sniff] so Vita herself in her own life dr-, kind of 
lived out a lot of different roles and somehow managed to kind of keep them all 
kind 
of going at once however having given you that information i would also say 
Orlando A Biography is clearly not a biography of Vita Sackville-West it's 
rather a fantastical jeu d'esprit yet it plays with the issues which arise from 
life writing including the central issue which is can anyone ever know for sure 
the truth of someone else's life especially if that subject is remote in time 
is it possible to ever really know somebody [sniff] now Rachel Bowlby suggests 
that there are two related aspects in the publication and in the reception of 
biographies and she terms them this way the exemplary-didactic story for our 
times and the projective identifying oneself as biographer or a reader with 
another's story now if you think of those two terms i think neither of them 
allow for impartiality and objectivity either you're telling it with a kind of 
moral purpose i'm telling you this story because you can apply it to our times 
now or 
you're kind of vicariously kind of living out you know almost a fantasy self er 
[sniff] so i think what er Bowlby does is to give us definitions of 
contemporary trends in biography writing now when Leslie Stephen edited The 
Dictionary of National Biography he was engaged in a project which was 
doubtless seen as impartial and objective a kind of authoritative compilation 
although the editorial choices involved in deciding who should be included in 
this monument to late Victorian culture er must have included a set of implicit 
value judgements er but i suspect that they weren't consciously applied so 
Virginia Woolf née Stephen of course would go on to question many of these 
value judgements in her own writings and in particular er value judgements 
which centre around issues of gender and empire things which er the Victorian 
establishment took for granted but which she as being on the margins of that 
society a kind of an outside insider er was 
able to kind of question and and and er question the the sense of them really 
so and i i would argue that the the playfulness of Orlando is not merely 
frivolous er but it's a way of questioning assumptions about sensitive issues 
especially around gender and sexuality and around politics and power and 
questioning the assumptions when you put those two things together gender and 
politics you know who has the power well it's usually not the men i mean to say 
it's usually not the women it's usually men in vic-, in Virginia Woolf's 
society er and that's again something i want to talk about more next term and i 
think Orlando is a way of questioning the assumptions absolutely of her 
father's generation but indeed also of some of her contemporaries and she had 
contemporaries who were also writing er biographies for example eminent 
Victorians er and again it's a way of her questioning their assumptions without 
causing too 
much offence or bringing the weight of the establishment down on her er and 
remember in the year that she publishes Orlando er Radclyffe Hall is actually 
being prosecuted for obscenity because of the publication of her novel The Well 
of Loneliness which also talks about lesbianism er but does this in a more 
realist way er and consequently i mean Radclyffe Hall as it were didn't get 
away with it okay so i think that brings me to my first extract er which i put 
on the sheet partly 'cause you may not have your book with you and partly 
because you're probably all working from different texts er it's as you see 
from the start of chapter two and it's one of a number of places in the text 
where the biographer calls attention to himself so chapter two begins [sniff] 
the biographer is now faced with a difficulty which it is better perhaps to 
confess than to gloss over up to this point in telling the story of Orlando's 
life documents both private and historical have made it possible 
to fulfil the first duty of a biographer which is to plod without looking to 
right or left in the indelible footprints of truth unenticed by flowers 
regardless of shade on and on methodically till we fall plump into the grave 
and write finis on the tombstone above our heads but now we come to an episode 
which lies right across our path so there is no ignoring it yet it is dark 
mysterious and undocumented so that there is no explaining it volumes might be 
written in interpretation of it whole religious systems be founded upon the 
signification of it our simple duty is to state the facts as far as they are 
known and so let the reader make of them what he may sorry put that back on if 
i can right [sniff] shades of Dickens and er facts in there i think so to state 
the obvious if anything is obvious in this novel Virginia Woolf the author is 
not the biographer in the text who 
refers to himself impersonally er the biographer is now faced with he doesn't 
say i am now faced with or he adopts the first person plural pronoun er our 
simple duty is that kind of thing er which i think is a habit of scholarly 
prose which some of us still continue er i imagine this is because this 
suggests that all individual subjectivity has been edited out er and that this 
man of letters is drawing on and purveying a more general truth he's a 
spokesman for the truth for the facts er and that this is not just an 
idiosyncratic take on his subject so that kind of our duty is the biographer is 
now faced with er conveys weight and authority and suggests that the value 
judgements and the discriminations made by the biog-, biographer are pretty 
much infallible er because they're part of a wider set of assumptions that all 
right thinking men adhere to er Woolf the author though does just enough for 
the biographer to appear somewhat fussy and narrow minded in his 
preoccupation with facts and the indelible footprints of truth he becomes a 
somewhat ridiculous absurd character i think in effect she's parodying the 
conventional biographer of late Victorian times which is to say she is 
parodying and critiquing her father's life's work so much of this parody is an 
attack of the man of letters who believes in the indelible footprints of truth 
and defines these as having to tread quite a narrow path er and th-, i think 
what you might want to do is to examine for yourselves the various points in 
the text where the biographer calls attention to himself and i'm saying himself 
er and calls attention to his dilemmas er and then c-, try and consider him as 
er as a character in this novel er and think about the distance between the 
point of view of this character er and the point of view of Virginia Woolf as 
author and as agent controlling the discourse overall and i would argue that 
she is saying something radically different from what the 
biographer says and that the gap between them at times is a great gulf er i 
might say a little bit more about how she does that later on [sniff] okay so 
that's talking about biography and the role of the biographer as a perhaps a 
major character in the novel i want now just to think a little bit about parody 
er and consider other types of parody in the novel apart from this main one of 
of the biographer and not just dwelling on Virginia Woolf née Stephen as er an 
undutiful daughter er just sort of broadening it out a bit now i think there's 
a further parody of the biographical conventions through the illustrations 
which are included in the text and again just to remind you i've put a couple 
of those on the sheet here and again i'm going to read from Hermione Lee who i 
do think is Virginia Woolf's perfect biographer and i'm trying to say that with 
absolute seriousness i really do recommend you read her work so Hermione Lee 
says from the outset Virginia envisaged 
Orlando as an illustrated book the pictures with an index and acknowledgements 
were part of the paraphernalia of the fake biography there were to be portraits 
of Sackville ancestors for Orlando as a young man photographs of Vita for 
Orlando as a woman and a portrait of Orlando's lost love the Russian princess 
Sasha this would be Angelica now a ravishing nine year old Virginia and Vita 
went together to Knole to choose Sackville ancestors Virginia made Vita pose as 
a voluptuous Lely for the photographer Lenare and then we get in parentheses 
what Vita thought about it she says i was miserable draped in an inadequate bit 
of pink satin with all my clothes slipping off but V was delighted and kept 
diving under the black cloth of the camera to peek at the effect then the 
Hermione Lee goes on Vanessa and Duncan then decided to join in and Vita even 
more miserable and feeling like
quote an unfortunate victim end quote was made to sit inside a huge frame while 
they took endless photographs and Virginia sat reading and commenting on all 
the obituary notices in that day's Times and made them all giggle Vita was 
indeed being framed [sniff] so if one considers the portraits and photographs 
for a moment and i don't know if you did consider them whilst reading the the 
novel er i think the interesting thing apart from the fact that they often are 
the paraphernalia of biographies er is that photographic theory might tell us 
that the camera never lies er that the fascinating fact about the photographic 
image is that it is always literal it is never figurative er that is it can 
never function as a metaphor because it is a literal record of its subject and 
i have to say in in in those remarks i am very indebted to to Barthes who i er 
whose er work on on photography i think is great i don't actually can't 
remember what the English title is it's La 
Chambre Claire in French the er light chamber would be a exact translation er 
[sniff] so if we are interested in indelible truth the light chamber where 
patterns of light are registered on light sensitive film is about the closest 
we can get to recording the actuality of one particular moment in time yet 
after that image has been captured and printed or even during the process of 
development itself it is vulnerable to manipulation so the lively Vita felt 
miserable trapped and framed by the process of being the photographic model and 
i think it's significant that Virginia felt the need to repeatedly gaze at her 
through the camera lens er while also reading obituaries which after all are if 
you want the ultimate form of biography the life written just after death or 
often prepared at the point of death for publication in the Times the next day 
so it's a kind of death writing if you want er so even if the camera and the 
photographic image is literal and true and true to its subject the model is 
manipulated as Vita was and in her case she's manipulated to dress up in skimpy 
clothes to present a different version of herself er and i've put a couple of 
the the photographs of her on the sheet where i think she's very much being 
made to dress up you know she's she's dressing up to play a part er [sniff] and 
of course she is then further fictionalized by the context within which the 
photograph is placed in the text the images of Vita Sackville-West in Orlando A 
Biography become fictionalized as images of this totally fantastic subject er 
or should that be fantasized by Virginia Woolf as images of her fictionalized 
fictional subject er either way the indelible print of truth is now through 
Virginia Woolf's playfulness and manipulations er a very kind of slippery 
concept er it's it's an image this footprint of truth whose meaning i think 
keeps slipping between 
different levels of signification er so is this just an elaborate joke the butt 
of the humour being Virginia Woolf's father er so an obituary to the late 
Victorian man of letters and his culture is it a homage to Vita it was 
described by s-, by some people at the time as the longest love letter in the 
English language er is it a very ambiguous flirtation with the English 
aristocracy by an avowedly socialist and feminist writer er i think the 
parodying of biographical conventions opens up all of these possibilities er in 
the reading of the text and of course it's that playfulness which allows 
Virginia Woolf to do all those things how am i doing for time er the the second 
of my er extracts excuse me i'm my voice is going [sniff] the second of my 
extracts is from the start of chapter five and beneath it i have put probably 
totally illegible i apologize for that but just to draw it to your attention 
the first 
chapter of Charles Dickens' Bleak House if you remember chapter five is the 
point when we've just got into the nineteenth century so what i want to suggest 
is that throughout Orlando Virginia Woolf parodies the style the literary style 
of the historical period she's talking about so that i-, in chapter five when 
we get into the nineteenth century she quite self-consciously deliberately 
parodies the prose of Dickens [cough] i don't know if i've got time just to 
read you a little of that the great cloud which hung not only over London but 
over the whole of the British Isles on the first day of the nineteenth century 
stayed or rather did not stay for it was buffeted about constantly by 
blustering gales long enough to have extraordinary consequences upon those who 
lived beneath its shadow a change seemed to have come over the climate of 
England rain fell frequently but only in fitful gusts which were no sooner over 
than they began again 
and then she moves from that to er a kind of developing of the metaphor of 
dampness dampness er in all its possible kind of workings and connotations is 
an elaborately developed over at at least two pages and i won't go into all 
that now 'cause that would be perhaps tedious in a lecture er [sniff] but it is 
very similar to what Charles Dickens does at the start of Bleak House where he 
takes again a kind of er a climate metaphor this time fog er the great London 
smog and develops it into a metaphor for the workings of er Chancery the court 
of Chancery the Lord Chancellor er and again starts by what appears to be 
possibly realistic description but then moves into er a kind of fantastical 
mode which totally leaves realism behind i mean one of the things one can 
perhaps say about Virginia Woolf is that she's writing er in a modernist 
tradition and that one might try and define modernism as coming after 
nineteenth century social realism and therefore b-, having as its its er its 
style that of antirealism 
er and yet i think what one can see here is that in parodying Dickens er she's 
not parodying something which is not already there Dickens himself often moves 
off into fantastical and kind of gothic er elements as ways of making a comment 
on the social situation so that's another kind of parody which goes on 
throughout this this novel and again something you might want to do in more 
detail on your own or in seminar is kind of work out what other prior texts are 
being parodied by Virginia Woolf er but i do want to to mention the fact and 
that's over the page on the sheet that she also parodies herself er she 
parodies the Time Passes section of To the Lighthouse which is the novel which 
i said at the start is based on her childhood kind of summers spent at Talland 
House er and has er an elaborate first section where the comings and goings in 
the house are described at length and then moves into a short middle section 
called Time Passes where the whole of the Great 
War is kind of dealt with in a few pages and including you know people kind of 
dying on battlefields er the miss-, Mrs Ramsey character dying and so on er and 
again i've just taken a small amount for the sheet to give you a kind of a feel 
for it er it's it's it it's that sense of trying to capture the passing of time 
kind of skimming over the top of it rather telling er details as you might 
normally er so my fifth extract is from the Time Passes section of To the 
Lighthouse night after night summer and winter the torment of storms the arrow-
like stillness of fine weather held their court without interference listening 
had there been anyone to listen from the upper rooms of the empty house only 
gigantic chaos streaked with lightning could have heard tumbling and tossing as 
the winds and waves disported themselves like the amorphous bulks of leviathans 
whose brows are pierced by no light of reason mounted one on top of another and 
lunged and plunged in the darkness 
or the daylight for night and day month and year ran shapelessly together in 
idiot games until it seemed as if the universe were battling and tumbling in 
brute confusion and wanton lust aimlessly by itself well i tried to read that 
with a slight sense of how easy it might be to parody that slightly breathless 
style er which is in effect what Virginia Woolf does in what i put on as the 
fourth extract on the sheet it was now November after November comes December 
then January February March and April after April comes May June July August 
follow next is September then October and so behold here we are back at 
November again with the whole year accomplished er [sniff] but clearly there 
you know it's the poor biographer who she's she's turning into a kind of butt 
at her sense of humour and i do think there may be behind this again a kind of 
serious philosophical point but i'll come to that in a minute okay so that's 
just to alert 
you to different kinds of parody in the text and i'm not going to kind of carry 
on talking about that now because i want to talk about the whole issue of 
writing history er before we finish [sniff] okay so my next sish-, section is 
about history [cough] [sniff] and i just want to quote you again something i 
quoted you earlier and just listen to it carefully Vita was the latest in a 
line of the noble Sackvilles whose history she had lovingly written a few years 
before Orlando in Knole and the Sackvilles nineteen-twenty-two on which Woolf 
drew extensively for her background to the novel so i quoted that to you that 
earlier in the lecture as a quick way of providing some background information 
about Vita Sackville-West and about the fact that she had an aristocratic 
family background however i want to come back to the quotation and think about 
the exact phrasing which Rachel Bowlby uses here she 
says whose history she had lovingly written a few years before it's very 
careful very carefully chosen phrase and yet even Rachel Bowlby who i think is 
a great stylist cannot avoid the ambiguity of the word history does she mean 
Vita wrote down lovingly the authentic and true record of events as they 
actually happened or does she mean Vita wrote down her account of her family's 
past for in the English language history refers both to what has happened in 
the past as it happened at the time er which is perhaps what we imply by kind 
of saying colloquially you know that's history he's history whatever meaning 
you know it's past it's over i don't have to bother about it er but history 
also refers to the writing of history the study of history er the activity of 
historians working with secondary sources and producing a kind of narrative 
account er which we should perhaps more accurate-, accurately refer to as as 
historiography er in fact the only kind of 
history we can ever know is actually the second historiography th-, the telling 
of the past shaping an account telling a story about it using a variety of 
sources to build up to build up what an accurate account of the past an as 
accurate a picture as possible or you know my interpretation of events as 
opposed to somebody else's interpretation of events er arguably even when we 
try to build up as accurate a picture as possible inevitably all we actually do 
is give you know our interpretation of events my own interpretation of events 
er so in the nineteenth century historians tended to believe that political 
history was more valuable than other kinds of history that the stories of 
nations could be told through the exploits of famous men military leaders 
rulers ambassadors diplomats whatever [sniff] er and in fact there was a whole 
series called Story of Nations which i don't suppose anyone here is is kind of 
old enough to 
remember but anyway but there are other ways of telling stories of the past 
which might concentrate on the daily existence of very ordinary people er and 
in fact that approach to historical studies didn't really begin to be developed 
until around the time that Virginia Woolf was writing Orlando er the first 
issue of Annales came out in nineteen-twenty-nine er and this was a French 
journal which was the focus for a new trend in historical studies pioneered i 
think mainly by hi-, French historians and which led eventually to choosing my 
favourite er text like er Le Roy Ladurie's Montaillou Village Occitan er which 
came out in nineteen-seventy-five er Montaillou er Occitan Village from er 
twelve-ninety-four to thirteen-twenty-four takes just a very short time span 
and writes about what happens in the village in those rather turbulent times er 
[sniff] Knole and the Sackvilles tells us from its 
title that it is a story of a stately home and its illustrious family 
Montaillou Village Occitan on the other hand is about a small peasant village 
and its inhabitants at a turbulent moment in the history of the region and one 
of the things it talks about is the the the Countess who lives there and and 
her kind of er her amour but it's only one of the things it's not the central 
focus er so as so often in her writing by critiquing the style and the 
underlying ideological assumptions of late Victorian and Edwardian culture 
Virginia Woolf exhibits a kind of prescience of later twentieth century trends 
and literary developments because she's kind of on the cusp of seeing where 
things need to go next so what Woolf critiques and parodies in Orlando is 
essentially the Whig version of history i would say that this has an an 
optimistic assumption that history is a steady upward progress towards the 
present moment which is seen as the pinnacle of achievement and it's only to 
be bettered by the future achievements of the human race so it might intend to 
be implicitly self-congratulatory and self-affirming er and one of its 
assumptions is indeed that history is the history of mankind of the deeds of 
great men but not necessarily apart from a few honourable exceptions of great 
women or women at all er so in British history er at the time that that 
Virginia Woolf was was writing er the honourable kind of exceptions might 
include er Boudicca Boadicea Queen Elizabeth the First who becomes a kind of 
mythologized in Victorian culture Queen Victoria herself is kind of 
mythologized while she's still alive and possibly you get kind of Nell Gwyn 
selling oranges er and getting a passing mention as as Charles the Second's 
mistress so i think one of the aspects of Orlando's sex change is the effect it 
has on a historical narrative er and in a way Virginia Woolf is asking the 
question does it make a difference 
would it alter our perspective substantially if history were routinely her 
story as well er so i believe this is one of the questions Virginia Woolf 
wishes to raise here again i've given you a couple of small extracts extracts 
six and seven where we have the biographer in again to give a truthful account 
of London society at that or indeed at any other time is beyond the powers of 
the biographer or the historian only those who have little need of the truth 
and no respect for it the poets and the novelists can be trusted to do it for 
this is one of the cases where the truth does not exist nothing exists the 
whole thing is a miasma a mirage i think he's having a rather kind of bad day 
this biographer i think at this stage er and then again a few pages later 
they're both quotes from chapter four to when we're in the eighteenth century 
er he says as that is not a question that can engage the attention of a 
sensible man let us who enjoy the immunity of all 
biographers and historians from any sex whatsoever pass it over and merely 
state that Orlando professed great enjoyment in the society of her own sex and 
leave it to the gentlemen to prove as they are very fond of doing that it is 
impossible so both these quotes are as i say are from chapter f-, four when 
we're in the eighteenth century and in both Virginia Woolf elides the 
biographer and the historian suggesting that their's are very similar 
activities namely trying to get at the truth by scrutinizing a variety of 
secondary sources [cough] but also suggesting that this is you know an 
impossible task in a way now this is at a stage in the text where Orlando 
vacillates between genders on a daily basis er but i don't want to kind of as i 
say talk about that in great detail now t-, talk about all those shifts in 
sexuality gendered identity the clothes and so on er what i do want to to just 
draw your attention to is the ways in which arguably Virginia 
Woolf also shifts and vacillates in the text here so to begin with i suggested 
when talking about the biographer that we should differentiate between this 
perplexed biographer historian figure and Virginia Woolf the author who lurks 
somewhere behind and beyond the text doing her best to make us all giggle at 
the biographer and historian and his limitations but in chapter four arguably 
in fact arguably throughout er she's also a presence in the text a distinct 
voice that's kind of moves in and out so sometimes it's the biographer and 
sometimes it's this other arch voice er and i think she her voice destabilizes 
our reading of the novel er so we can't read it as if it were just written by 
the biographer it's not that straightforward er she is the poet and novelist 
gesturing towards other kinds of knowledge other ways of compremen-, 
comprehending his or her stories er and i think she's a kind of androgynous or 
possibly female consciousness er which suggests that the biographer who 
assumes that masculinity is synonymous with universal truth is missing 
something er so i mean i think if one feels kind of worried and anxious reading 
this text this is partly because er what Virginia Woolf is doing is precisely 
trying to to throw you and throw your assumptions about you know where you 
think you are er Gerda Lerner an American historiographer of women's history 
has commented and i'm sorry i'm g-, you know moving into American 'cause i was 
kind of where i'm really based er the key to understanding women's history is 
in accepting painful though it may be that it is the history of the majority of 
the human race so Virginia Woolf i think toys with the reader trying to tease 
out this recognition without quite stating it as emphatically as Gerda Lerner 
would for our generation which is a post-war generation [sniff] i want to 
mention briefly er just a few other aspects of Orlando as a kind of meditation 
on on history 
and historiography now the first is that i said that Orlando is a kind of 
critique a parody of the Whig version of history but we also get as it were the 
alternative to the Whig version of history and it's personified in the figure 
of Nick Greene the poet and man of letters who occurs in the Elizabethan era 
and reoccurs in modern times and if you recall he's always disaffected with the 
present age as an Elizabethan poet he prefers the classics and as a modern 
critic he abhors contemporary writing and harps back to the Elizabethan era as 
a glorious period in English literature its golden age now i've not given you 
this quotation i don't think but just to remind you when er Orlando meets him 
in London in the kind of the modern times ah he said heaving a sigh which was 
yet comfortable enough ah my dear lady the great days of literature are over 
Marlowe Shakespeare Ben Jonson those were the giants Dryden Pope Addison those 
were the heroes all all are 
dead now and whom have we left us Tennyson Browning Carlyle he threw an immense 
amount of scorn into his voice the truth of it is he said pouring himself a 
glass of wine that all our young writers are in the pay of booksellers they 
turn out any trash that serves to pay their tailor's bills it is an age he said 
helping himself to hors d'oeuvres marked by precious conceits and wild 
experiments none of which the Elizabethans would have tolerated for an instant 
so rather than believing that history is the story of the ascent of man to 
higher and higher peaks Nick Greene subscribes to the belief that history is 
all downhill moving further and further away from a putative golden age and 
Woolf indicates the kind of subjectivity and the fallacy in this analysis by 
having him glorify in modern times the exact same literary period which he was 
so dismissive about at the time in Elizabethan times okay one further 
reflection i think i have time for er is 
that Orlando is both a fantastical biography a fantastical history of the lives 
and times of Orlando and as i say also a history of the English literary 
imagination and its succeeding styles which is perhaps the only proof we have 
and this is highlighted by Orlando's poem The Oak Tree which survives the 
centuries to win a literary prize in modern times er and it's also there in 
Woolf's parodying different literary styles [cough] but the general point i 
want to make is that and it applies both to history and literary history we 
tend to think of history in terms of periods and also to think of literary 
history in terms of periods which become synonymous or interchangeable with 
descriptions of style so in the course of this lecture i've referred to the 
Elizabethan era the eighteenth century the nineteenth century late Victorian 
culture modern times with a fairly confident assumption that when i use these 
terms they 
kind of mean something you have kind of clusters of associations which build up 
a picture of sort of snapshot picture of the these times but i think the terms 
are deceptive and they're a very shorthand way of indicating how time passes 
and how that passage of time affects cultures in actuality the passage of time 
from the Elizabethan era to the eighteenth century is not a handful of 
photographic images a succession of imagined snapshots but is a continuous 
fluid process the passage of time from seventeen-ninety-nine to eighteen-
hundred similarly was fluid even if we speak of the eighteenth century as the 
time of the Enlightenment the age of reason and then the nineteenth century as 
the Victorian era er and victu-, vic-, and Virginia Woolf born into late 
Victorian culture didn't wake up one morning in nineteen-hundred er to discover 
that somehow she and everything around her had transformed overnight had 
metamorphosed like a kind of butterfly out of a 
you know pupa so i think this is why in her other writing er she is famously 
known as writing stream of consciousness style which is trying to capture the 
fluidity of the process rather than fix it in snapshots er and stream of 
consciousness is actually a translation of a French term élan vital which is 
introduced er by the philosopher Henri Bergson er and in fact vital is that 
word again Vita 
nf0062: if we look at the text of Orlando i bo-, A Biography er i think we find 
that most of the time she's not doing stream of consciousness because she is 
doing this kind of satire this parody this critique and one of the things she 
parodies is precisely our tendency to frame historical periods so at the end of 
chapter four she writes and i've given you that as the eighth extract er i 
don't think i'm going to give it to you all now Orlando could remember even now 
the smell of tortuous Elizabethan highways on a hot night in the little rooms 
and narrow pathways of 
the city now she leaned out of her window all was light order and serenity 
there was a faint rattle of a coach on the cobbles she heard the faraway cry of 
the night watchman just twelve o'clock on a frosty morning and then i'll skip a 
bit with the twelfth stroke of midnight the darkness was complete a turbulent 
welter of cloud covered the city all was darkness all was doubt all was 
confusion the eighteenth century was over the nineteenth century had begun so 
the eighteenth century is all was light order and serenity and then as soon as 
you get the last stroke of midnight all was darkness all was doubt all was 
confusion clearly there's a critique of the ways in which we talk about 
historical times so what do we conclude from all this one of Virginia Woolf's 
recurring preoccupations is to do with her own situation as a woman of letters 
in patriarchal culture and she returns again and again to note the difference 
it makes to be a woman in a patriarchy and she can 
be witty and scathing about this but one of the benefits of her position is 
that she cannot take for granted all the things which a man of letters whether 
he be historian biographer editor er critic publisher poet or novelist just 
takes as read so i would argue that Virginia Woolf's lesbian attraction to Vita 
Sackville-West might well have been a catalyst er the catalyst which decided 
her to write this jeu d'esprit a satire a whole fantasy and these are all 
phrases which Virginia uses in her diary as she starts to conceive the project 
but the the completed work is far more than just this jeu d'esprit through 
parody Woolf both enacts and then critiques the history and literary history of 
her culture from as it were a different space now what the diary entry actually 
says is no attempt is to be made to realize the character sapphism is to be 
suggested satire is to be 
the main note satire and wilderness now you might object that there's not much 
wilderness in the text er and i think literally speaking that's true but 
conceptually the text is written from if you want the cultural wilderness from 
the wild spaces of female culture which gazes sceptically on patriarchal 
culture from the margins now Elaine Showalter in the eighties theorized this 
wild zone of female culture er when trying to talk about a female aesthetic in 
woman's writing er and so that's why next term when i talk about modernism and 
gender i want to come back to those issues and try and give er a more coherent 
account of of Virginia Woolf's ideas about women's writing and again how it 
might be applied to a reading of this text sorry i've overrun again by a few 
minutes