INTRODUCTION

       by Tilda Swinton

      One morning, Virginia Woolf sat down to work on a critical piece of fiction and, having first dropped her head in her hands in despair:

      ‘dipped my pen in the ink, and wrote these words as if automatically, on a clean sheet: Orlando: a Biography. No sooner had I done this than my body was flooded with rapture and my brain with ideas. I wrote rapidly till 12.’

      A year and two days later, she laid down her pen, having written the date – 11 October 1928 – as the final words of this, the book you are now holding.

      *

      Virginia Woolf was the loyal daughter, not only of an erudite and distinguished biographer, but also of his library, her early dependence on which formed the foundation of her entire intellectual life. Her later biography of Roger Fry must have satisfied this debt in a quite particular way. But at this point she wanted to write freely – ‘wildly’ – as an imaginative novelist, and Orlando gave her the chance to split the atom: a fantastical biography – inspired by a very real human being – but essentially a whim of imagination, a wild goose chase. She called it her ‘writer’s holiday’.

      Vita Sackville-West was the intended recipient of ‘the longest love letter in the world’, as Sackville-West’s own son Nigel Nicholson described it. She was certainly its primary inspiration. Writing to her on the day of Orlando’s inception, Woolf asks:

      ‘Suppose Orlando turns out to be Vita . . . there’s a kind of shimmer of reality which sometimes attaches itself to my people, as the lustre on an oyster shell . . . shall you mind? Say yes or no. Your excellence as a subject arises largely from your noble birth (but what’s 400 years of nobility, all the same?) and the opportunity this gives for florid descriptive passages in great abundance. Also, I admit I should like to untwine and twist again some very odd, incongruous strands in you . . . and also it sprung upon me how I could revolutionise biography in a night: and so if agreeable to you I would like to toss this up into the air and see what happens.’

      Sackville-West was an object of true fascination for Woolf. She offered, beyond the specifics of a sincerely personal and sympathetic relationship, a kind of experiential harmony of so much that was dear to Woolf at second hand: the maternal abundance of her own – beloved and sorely missed – mother; the liberated sensual life Woolf looked for in herself and found inhibited; the kind of uncomplicated noble confidence she craved. ‘I want coronets; but they must be old coronets; coronets that carry land with them and country houses; coronets that breed simplicity, eccentricity, ease’, she wrote in 1936.

      Twisting copious incongruous strands, then, this elegant fictional portrait gives us the Lord Orlando: proto Emo-poet prince; the beautiful, sensitive, brave, lonely, saucy, questing, spaniel-loving toff, with a house the size of a town and a family with exotic as well as indigenous branches to its tree; the romantic who carries in his/her breast through four centuries the life-stained manuscript of his/her one great poem, ‘The Oak Tree’. Sackville-West had famously won the prestigious Hawthornden Prize for her long poem ‘The Land’ the year Orlando was begun. During the suffocating Victorian period, feeling herself under pressure to find a mate, Orlando flings herself down in the wild moor’s heather, declaring herself – definitively – nature’s bride, none other’s.

      Woolf tells us her fantastic prince/ss is Vita but she leaves herself out of the mix and that feels shy of the whole picture. Orlando’s ancestors, their courtyards and acres, treasures and traditions, cramped their descendant’s style no less than Woolf’s was pinched by the honour she owed to her father’s Dictionary of National Biography. Forefathers and How to Survive Them is as good a subtitle for this book as any other.

      The subject of inheritance had long intrigued Woolf. She writes of herself as ‘descended from a great many people, some famous, some obscure’, and grew up in a house inhabited by a domestic group made up of three families converged (her parents brought four children between them to their marriage and proceeded to have four more). She constantly played with the various atmospheres of her childhood