SOURCE: Virginia Woolf and Her Works, translated by Jean Stewart, Hogarth Press, 1965, 488 p.

In the following excerpt, Guiguet draws on Woolf's diary entries to examine her intentions in writing Orlando and to assess the significance of the novel to her literary development.

On December 20, 1927, two and a half months after she has started on Orlando, the first half of which has already been drafted, Virginia Woolf writes in the Diary:

How extraordinarily unwilled by me but potent in its own right, by the way, Orlando was! as if it shoved everything aside to come into existence. Yet I see looking back just now to March that it is almost exactly in spirit, though not in actual facts, the book I planned then as an escapade; the spirit to be satiric, the structure wild, Precisely.

One must note in this passage the three characteristics of Orlando (mentioned moreover in...