Anne Clifford as Orlando: Virginia Woolf's feminist historiology and women's biography

Abstract

Abstract women's biography is a central study for feminist historians who trace continuity and change in women's history. Virginia woolf's Orlando has remained elusive despite the fact that its subject is well attested as Vita Sackville-West. This article makes a new and specific identification for a source of the young Orlando's persona in Anne Clifford (1590-1676), a Sackville Elizabethan ancestor. For this connection there is ample, but until now largely ignored, evidence in the text and manuscript of Orlando and in other work by Virginia Woolf, and by Anne Clifford and Vita Sackville-West themselves. Both Anne Clifford and Vita Sackville-West (1892-1962) were dispossessed of their estates by patriarchal legal process. The charting of their history in itself (re)empowers them. Moreover, the method adopted by Virginia Woolf, drawing as it does on her subjects' own historical-biographical style, and offering unity in historiology, empowers feminists in pursuit of women's history