Orlando

Reading Orlando for an upcoming book discussion. My copy is littered with sticky-notes and tags, underlinings and notations in the wide margins (thank god that it's almost a facsimile of the original edition). I'm the only one (I think ) who's read the book before, or any book by Virginia Woolf. So I've been researching again.

The problem of Virginia Woolf as biographer, and this has been made a point by several critics, is that her stream-of-consciousness style of writing does not meld easily with the art of biography. The result is that in attempting to sound biographical, in attempting to sound like the academic, she comes off as a parody, at best, of the academic history.

I can see this leading to arguments.

Orlando is her strongest biography, even though it is a novel. And I think the reason it's so strong as a biography is because it is a novel. Flush suffers from the limitations of being told through the point of view of a dog. Roger Fry suffers from the fact that it was her only strict biography (the life of her good friend and fellow Bloomsbury group critic, Roger Fry, now mostly forgotten). "The rules of biography do not sit well with Mrs. Woolf" I remember someone having written in a review of the final tome. In attempting to cross fictional techniques with a person's history, she tragically cannot stop herself from embelishing the tale with the things which make her writing her writing.

And is this such a bad thing? Who's to say. It's not my place. I'm only a reader/reviewer.

JPC