I should like to write novel certainly: novel that would be as lovely as Persian carpet, and as unreal. - Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (67) In matters of grave importance, style, not sincerity is vital thing. - Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest (1659) Roshan-i-chasm-i-man - Persian love greeting to Virginia Woolf from Vita Sackville-West, 4 August 1927 (DeSalvo 241) Musha-i-djabah-dal-imam - Mock-Persian response to Vita Sackville-West, 7 August 1927 (DeSalvo 241) Why would Virginia Woolf fabricate signifiers of an Asian language? At personal level, she is encoding and decoding an intimate, private language to her lover and muse, Vita Sackville-West, just returned from second journey to Teheran and expressing doubts about stability of their relationship. Since Woolf's attempt to match her correspondent's Farsi is wholly imaginative one, she offers translation to reassure Sackville-West of her devotion, coupled with mild rebuke: Which being interpreted means, Darling-West-what-a-donkey-you-are - all my letters in future are going to be addressed to Pippin, since it is clear you cant read them (241). Yet carefully cultivated self-consciousness of correspondents' appropriation of an exotic and oriental form of communication speaks volumes about particular mode of self-presentation and self-authentication, mode that expressed itself through highly inauthentic means. I refer here to kind of performative style and sensibility that distinctively marked 1920s Anglo-American lesbian and gay culture: namely, camp. It is sensibility that Woolf allowed to run riot - to degree hitherto unprecedented in her oeuvre - in her 1928 novel Orlando. The work plainly and simply purports to be biography in its subtitle, yet it soon becomes apparent that Orlando fulfills author's intention, as she expressed it in her diary, to write half in mock style very clear and plain (3: 162). Unashamedly thieving from multitude of genres, Orlando functions subversively and comically as mock biography, burlesque literary history, spoof bildungsroman, parodic Kunstlerroman, fantastic picaresque, and chic roman clef. Woolf originally disavowed any claims to seriousness in the pure delight of this farce (162), to inscribe life of woman, Vita Sackville-West, who was celebrated in 1920s English culture as preeminent figure of fashion and style (and literary popularity). If camp, as Mark Booth has put it, is a matter of [and] as such borrows much of its form from object of its parody (42), style of Woolf's novel, in some basic sense, mimetically represents author's first impression of florid, moustached, parakeet-coloured Sackville-West's aristocratic manner... something like actresses... (Diary 2: 216 - 17). A year or so before she began writing Orlando, Woolf recorded her feelings about Sackville-West in terms of excess that marks camp style. Trying to account for the secret of her glamour, Woolf describes object of her desire as having palpable air of voluptuousness about her; grapes are ripe & not reflective. No. In brain & insight she is not as highly organized as I am. But then she is aware of this... (Diary 3: 51). It is with good reason, therefore, that Sackville-West has gained an entry in Philip Core's encyclopedia of camp (105) while Woolf's novel is fruitfully considered within dominant strain in 1920s Anglo-American cultural expression that stressed self-consciously flamboyant and performative.(1) So when Woolf referred to her novel as joke (Diary 3: 185), she called attention to way in which Orlando's exaggerated artificiality, stylization, and glamour all seem - successfully and self-mockingly - to disavow any pretensions to asserting cultural power, disavowal that Mark Booth establishes as one of hallmarks of camp (30). …