Imaginary Lives: Orlando and A Room of One’s Own

Abstract

It is possible to detect elements of guilt over transpositions from Woolf’s (mother’s) life to the text of To the Lighthouse, and we can, I think, find evidence of a similar compunction in relation to Orlando. Orlando is a mock-biography of Vita Sackville-West, whom Woolf first met in 1922, and with whom she fell in love. Nigel Nicholson writes that her relationship with Vita was ‘the deepest relationship which Virginia ever had outside her family’. Both Nicholson and Quentin Bell are inclined to play down the sexual element in the relationship, but Sherron E. Knopp argues that:

… the letters between Virginia and Vita, published in 1978 and 1984 respectively, reveal an attachment that lasted in its physical expression not just the ‘few months, a year perhaps’ that Nicholson first speculated but at least two years beyond that and probably more, and it continued in emotional intensity until Virginia’s death in March 1941.¹