Historical Fictions, Fictional Fashions and Time: Orlando as the ‘Angel of History’

Abstract

Orlando (1928) is one of the novels by Woolf which at first sight could be called ‘historical’, since it traces the ‘life and works’ of the main character from Elizabethan times to the present. However, here Woolf extends her critique of traditional notions of subjectivity through biography, initiated in Jacob’s Room, not so much in order to write history as to upset the terms and assumptions of history writing concerning method and truth. The tone she adopts in this novel is conspicuously parodic. In what aspires to be no less than a review of English literature and history through a mock biography of a life that traverses the borders of gender and historical time, Woolf combines the flamboyant world of fantasy and fun with the sober task of (re)writing history from a critical point of view. The two are not as antithetical as it may seem at first, as the following entry in her diary reveals: Well but Orlando was the outcome of a perfectly definite, indeed overmastering impulse. I want fun. I want fantasy. I want (& this was serious) to give things their caricature value. And still this mood hangs about me. I want to write a history, say of Newnham or the womans [sic] movement, in the same vein.2