Did Virginia Woolf Write the Perfect Fantasy Novel of the Twentieth Century?

Introducing Orlando: a Young English Nobleman Who Lives for About Three Hundred Years and Becomes a Woman Along the Way

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On October 11, 1928, the great modernist writer Virginia Woolf published Orlando, a novel she considered a literary vacation. Woolf, who had dedicated her prolific literary career to getting as close as possible to reality—that most sacred of modernist imperatives—did the impossible in Orlando. Or at least, for those who had followed her literary career up to that point, the unthinkable: she published a fantasy novel, one that I consider to be the perfect fantasy novel of the twentieth century.

As much as Woolf’s extensive literary criticism testifies to her taste— and I assume it is a reliable testament—what is truly astonishing about this achievement is the fact that the English author was never interested in the supernatural. Not in a religious sense, nor in a folkloric one. Her religion was literature, and she was its high priestess. The literature she worshipped always leaned towards the realist, the modernist, the impressionistic—never the fantastic. The only mention of the occult that I recall in her work—though there are surely others scattered throughout her vast oeuvre—is in her famous essay A Room of One’s Own. There, she argues that the so-called witches who were burned at the stake were, in reality, persecuted because the systematic silencing of women’s creativity throughout history had made them eccentric.

Even in Orlando, the novel we’re discussing today, there are not many references to magic or sorcery.

So how did she come to write such a powerful fantasy novel? What I just audaciously called “the perfect fantasy novel of the twentieth century”? The answer is quite simple: she let her imagination run free. She took a break from scientific—whether in quotation marks or not—representation and thought in more metaphorical terms.

More practically and anecdotally, she visited the ancestral home of her lover, Vita Sackville-West, and was deeply moved by the historical portraits of the family’s male ancestors. Woolf immediately recognized their resemblance to Vita herself. In her imagination, all these figures merged into a single person—incidentally a man—who lived for centuries, simply changing clothes and perhaps refreshing his vocabulary over time. Oh, and at a certain point, this man becomes a woman.

In Orlando, Woolf transforms her visit to Knole House into fiction, scattering different portraits of Orlando—or rather, of the Sackville men and Vita herself—throughout the novel.

‘Orlando as a boy,’ which appears in the frontispiece of the novel, is actually taken from a portrait of the Hon. Edward Sackville, from the right half of ‘The Two Sons of Edward, 4th Earl of Dorset’ by Cornelius Nuie

After embarking on her grand modernist experiments with stream of consciousness and the compression and extension of time in novels like Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, in this wild book, Woolf crafts a tribute to her friend and lover. This unconventional biography of a young man who becomes a woman was a satire of the genre of the biography—a joke stretched across hundreds of pages. Woolf adopts the serious tone of a biographer, a tone her father, Leslie Stephen, perfected in the Dictionary of National Biography, which he began compiling in 1882—the year of Virginia Woolf’s birth. But while her father outlined the external lives of the "great men" of the kingdom, in Orlando, Woolf repeatedly crosses boundaries, attempting to depict, above all, the inner life of her protagonist. Much of the humor in the novel arises precisely at the moments when the narrator-biographer fails to make that inward crossing.

Orlando was a detour from Woolf’s more "serious" work, a brief and swift vacation ("I have written this book quicker than any other"), a move away from "serious poetic experimental books whose form is always so closely considered." If in Mrs. Dalloway, her great and well-known novel, Woolf sought to condense an entire life into twenty-four hours—compressing the fifty-one years of her protagonist into a limited number of scenes unfolding in a single day—then in Orlando, Woolf follows the evolution of a personality without concern for whether the facts described are "true" or "realistic," this time stretching across three hundred years in the life of Orlando, an English nobleman with a family lineage tracing back to the Norman Conquest (the English equivalent, I suppose, of tracing one's roots to the Mayflower—or to the Exodus, if you're Israeli). Orlando is born in the Elizabethan era, making him a contemporary of Shakespeare and John Donne, though younger than both. At the beginning of the novel, he serves as the cherished and most esteemed favorite of Queen Elizabeth I.

Shortly after the death of the domineering queen—"a lady whom time has surprised," in the words of Sir Walter Raleigh—Orlando falls in love with Natasha, a Russian princess visiting England. They spend intimate time together, fall in love—at least, Orlando does—slipping out of the stuffy royal court for adventures among common folk. They arrange a secret rendezvous to flee together, abandoning all noble obligations for a shared life—the ultimate romantic dream—until everything shatters for Orlando. Natasha never arrives. She leaves without a word.

Desperate and heartbroken, and wearied by the advances of women in whom he has no interest, Orlando is appointed a diplomatic post under king James I, Elizabeth’s successor. And so, instead of fulfilling his initial fantasy—beheading heretics in Andalusia, as he dreamed in the novel’s opening scene—he is sent as an ambassador to the very seat of heresy, to the Sultan in Istanbul. During his mission, amidst a failed rebellion against the Sultan, Orlando falls into a mysterious slumber, from which he awakens as a woman. She spends the remainder of the novel—until the highly significant date of October 11, 1928 (the day the novel was published; Woolf always loved playing with time)—living as a woman. And suddenly, all the vast opportunities once available to Orlando as a young English nobleman shrink dramatically now that she is a thirty-year-old lady. She almost loses her ancestral home—a fate that, incidentally, befell Woolf’s friend in real life, precisely due to her gender—but ultimately manages to secure her claim. Oh, and all the while, he—and later she—dreams of composing great poetry and literature, only to fail spectacularly. Orlando is the ultimate dreamer, but great dreamers do not necessarily become great poets.

What Woolf, the literary genius, understood about writing fantasy—despite never being suspected of emerging from the more fantastical realms of literature—is the challenge every great fantasy work must grapple with: the meaning of magic. Magic as a metaphor for the novel’s central themes. After all, no great fantasy exists without magic in some form. For Woolf, the magic—the character’s immortality and their gender transformation—allowed her to explore questions of identity, the impact of time on personality (and vice versa), and what remains inside when everything external is in flux.

During my rereading of Orlando, I couldn’t help but think of Jorge Luis Borges’s short story The Immortal. Beyond the fact that Borges considered Orlando Woolf’s finest novel ("the most intense work and one of the most singular and maddening of our age") and was, in general, a crucial early champion of her writing in Latin America, his story reminds me of Orlando in one striking way: in both works, we follow a single character over an extraordinarily long period: about 300 years in Woolf’s case, a little under 2,000 in Borges’s. Borges emphasizes the loss of identity in a person who lives forever, allowing him to experience infinite incarnations within eternity—perhaps because he deals with a much vaster timespan. And yet, in both works, despite the colossal shifts in time, profession, and even gender, something internal always remains unchanged. The Roman general who meets Homer at the beginning of Borges’s story later becomes a translator of the legendary Greek poet—and later still, a book seller who specializes in ancient books. Likewise, Orlando—whether man or woman, noble courtier or respected lady, beloved of a queen or endlessly pursued by suitors—always remains devoted to literature, always retains their innocence, and, of course, always continues to dream.

Orlando quickly became Woolf’s most commercially successful book. Though the critics—both her supporters and her harshest detractors—didn’t know what to make of it. How to understand that novel, where to place it. In a profound sense, neither did Woolf herself. Only with time did literary scholars, academics, and devoted readers begin pulling different threads from the work, weaving new interpretations: some emphasized the satirical tone, other the historical vision, the way Woolf presents the history of English literature, or the gender questions, the fact that death—such a crucial theme in all her other books—disappears in the face of Orlando’s immortality. What I feel hasn’t been emphasized enough is Woolf’s complete and unapologetic foray deep into the realm of fantasy.

A Final Thought:

It is interesting that James Joyce also arrives at fantasy through modernism—modernism, which, again, was supposed to be a radical new attempt to get as close as possible to real life. In Joyce’s case, this happens most distinctly in Ulysses, particularly in the "Circe" episode, where all the characters in the book (and even all the objects) are granted the right to speak, leading to entirely fantastical situations—such as the scene in which Stephen Dedalus gets into a confrontation with his own hat, which, for some reason, won’t stop humiliating him.

It is well known that Virginia Woolf read Joyce’s novel multiple times and was deeply influenced by it. The first time, she thought this Joyce person was mad, as she noted in her diary. It was T. S. Eliot who urged her to give the book a second chance, and only then did the secrets of this oceanic novel begin to reveal themselves to her.

So how does a great modernist author craft a perfect work of fantasy? If I base my answer on Woolf and Joyce, I would say that it takes true talent, true persistence, a profound understanding of literature, a journey through thousands of years of human creativity—and a swift, confident, and joyful return, during which everything you’ve learned is turned on its head.

One of these days, though, I shall sketch here, like a grand historical picture, the outlines of all my friends… It might be a way of writing the memoirs of one's own times during people's lifetimes. It might be a most amusing book. The question is how to do it. Vita should be Orlando, a young nobleman. There should be Lytton. And it should be truthful; but fantastic.(Diary 3:156–157).