Orlando and the Politics of (In)Conclusiveness

In this chapter, Judith Allen explores a politics of inconclusiveness that, she argues, pervades Orlando. Attending to the patterning and gender politics of her chosen sentence, with its evocative lists and rhetorical repetitions, Allen highlights Michel de Montaigne’s influence on Woolf, and ranges from Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory to Gertrude Stein’s lists to examine the effects of Woolf’s refusal to come to a conclusion. With Montaigne’s question ‘Que sais-je?’ in mind, Allen identifies an essayistic, dialogic mode in Orlando resonant with the ‘wildness’ Woolf infused into this book. Allen thereby reveals something about Woolf’s writing that emerges in all the chapters: how it requires keen and active reading practices, asking readers to participate in making meaning, to move nimbly between minute detail and wide horizons of thought and vision, and to read on at least two levels at once.

A Spirit in Flux: Aestheticism, Evolution and Religion

In this chapter, Todd Avery takes the sentence ‘Orlando it seemed had a faith of her own’ as a prompt to explore the many expressions of spirituality and religion in the text. He traces through Orlando an unconventional, anti-institutional form of ‘Woolfian worship’ indebted to Walter Pater’s aestheticism and Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theory. Engaging multiple intersections between modernism and theology, Avery argues that ‘the spirituality of Orlando emerges from a deep wonder before the mystery, strangeness, and absurdity of life’. Avery’s reading illuminates the revelatory potential of Woolf’s writing.

Bibliographic Parturition in Orlando: Books, Babies, Freedom and Fame

In this chapter’s account of Woolf’s labour as a writer and publisher at the Hogarth Press, Alice Staveley connects the labour of mothers and writers, and the delivery of babies and books. Reading the converging deliveries of Orlando’s poem ‘The Oak Tree’, her son, and the manuscript of Orlando, Staveley analyses Woolf’s invocation of her own 1919 short story ‘Kew Gardens’ in the novel’s final pages. Sounding the resonances of this story’s published forms, particularly the limited luxury edition issued in 1927, Staveley argues that the Kew Gardens scene turns the ‘narratological modernist motif of closure-as-return into a materialist tribute’.

and nothing whatever happened’: Orlando’s Continuous Eruptive Form

In this chapter, Suzanne Bellamy draws attention to the density of reference encompassed by a single sentence from Orlando, alighting on intertextual resonances between Woolf, Sackville-West, Stein and Laurence Sterne. The sentence on which Bellamy focuses is ‘a very long and daring exercise in linguistic implosion’; through its many-layered parody – notably of Woolf’s own writing in To the Lighthouse – this sentence undermines the narrative contract sustaining nature writing and mimetic description. However, as Bellamy’s reading reveals, it also enacts a Steinian process of composition as explanation, thus shedding light on Orlando as a modernist textual and visual experiment that enables new modes of perception.

Aftersentence

In this closing piece, Rachel Bowlby performs her engagement with Woolf’s sentences, and her response to the preceding chapters, in a fictional-essayistic mode which mimics, distorts, re-writes and reflects on Woolfian and academic sentences.

Sir Thomas Browne and the Reading of Remains in Orlando

In this chapter, Benjamin Hagen explores the ways in which Woolf encourages and teaches us to become ‘more agile, creative and discerning readers’. Examining a sentence that is also a scene of reading, Hagen addresses some persistent ethical and political questions triggered by Woolf’s notion of ‘a reader’s part’ (O 52). He takes on the sentence’s challenge to confront issues of colonial violence as it relates to practices of reading and writing, and turns particular focus on the role of Sir Thomas Browne in Orlando, whose presence provides a key to Woolf’s fascination with ruins and remains.

Orlando Famoso: Obscurity, Fame and History in Orlando

The spectres of past and future imagined literary spaces pervade Angeliki Spiropoulou’s chapter. Drawing on classical and Renaissance constructions of the hero and the poet, Spiropoulou addresses ideas of literary fame and immortality in Orlando. From the caricatured writer Nick Greene, who extols ‘La Gloire’ above material gain while simultaneously seeking patronage, to the gender politics of anonymity and obscurity, Spiropoulou interrogates the traditional ways in which biography builds fame. Her chapter explores the historically bound nuances of writing for glory, and considers Woolf’s own complex relationship to fame in light of Orlando’s popular success.

Rhythms of Revision and Revisiting: Unpicking the Past in Orlando

In this chapter, Jane de Gay invites us to explore a sentence in which Orlando as a Victorian woman writer is urged by the ‘spirit of the age’ to reconsider a few poetic lines she has just written. Voicing a passage from Sackville-West’s The Land (1926), these lines express a barely hidden lesbian eroticism, which is, paradoxically, intensified by intertextual allusions to canonical male writers. Addressing questions of censorship and self-censorship, de Gay demonstrates how Orlando’s sentences, with their accretions of past literary styles, encourage a nonlinear reading movement that ultimately affirms the free expression of same-sex desire.

Woolf, De Quincey and the Legacy of ‘Impassioned Prose’

In this chapter, Elsa Högberg illuminates Woolf’s sensual, lyrical writing in light of its contact with Thomas De Quincey’s ‘impassioned prose’, drawing out the erotic and political dimensions of the book as a gift to Sackville-West. Examining the dream-like, visual and musical aspects of a long sentence at the end of Chapter V, Högberg considers the gender politics involved in Woolf’s appropriation of De Quincey’s prose style. In Högberg’s reading, the lyricism of Orlando unravels the time of the legal sentence, and thereby the logic by which aesthetic and material property is passed down an exclusively male line of inheritance.

The Negress and the Bishop: On Marriage, Colonialism and the Problem of Knowledge

Calling on thinkers as diverse as Sigmund Freud, George ‘Bishop’ Berkeley and G. E. Moore, Randi Koppen identifies, in this chapter, a Woolfian reading practice that is alert to dense textual allusion. Her chosen sentence prompts examination of the ‘freakish and unequal’ aspects of Orlando and, more specifically, the ‘unequal juxtaposition’ of ‘biscuits and philosophy, Bishop and negress’, in Chapter V. Koppen discusses the manifold allusions encompassed in this sentence – including its dialogue with Woolf’s first novel, The Voyage Out (1915) – and throws into relief its ‘questions of marriage, of language and what we have in common, but also of the colonial origins of modernist aesthetics and life-styles’.