SOURCE: The World without a Self: Virginia Woolf and the Novel, Yale University Press, 1973, 259 p.

In the following excerpt, Naremore discusses Wool's attempt in Orlando to devise a new type of biography that evokes personality through a combination of fact and fiction.

In the interval between the demanding tasks of To the Lighthouse and The Waves, Virginia Woolf was occupied with Orlando, a mock biography inspired partly by her romantic friendship with Vita Sackville-West. The emphasis on fantasy allowed free rein to her naturally ornate, erotic style, and provided good material for sketches of vast, generalized landscapes. Perhaps more important, in pretending to write a biography Mrs. Woolf gave her prose some breathing room above the subjective deeps. As usual, she describes her central character in the third person and from an omniscient perspective; but here she chooses to look down through the eyes of a voluble, often...