SOURCE: Westman, Karin E. “The First Orlando: The Laugh of the Comic Spirit in Virginia Woolf's ‘Friendships Gallery.’” Twentieth-Century Literature 47, no. 1 (spring 2001): 39-71.

In the following essay, Westman maintains that “Friendships Gallery” best represents Woolf's development of a “new ‘art’ of biography that could negotiate the tension between fact and fiction” and identifies the story as the roots of her novel Orlando.

The Comic Spirit laughed meanwhile.

—“Friendships Gallery” (284)

If Orlando (1928) has typically been read as the literary consequence of Woolf's call for a new “art” of biography that could negotiate the tension between fact and fiction—between the “granite” and the “rainbow” of life, as Woolf's metaphor figures it in her review essay “The New Biography” (1927)—the early biographical sketch “Friendships Gallery” questions Orlando's pride of place in that critical narrative.¹ The laughter of the Comic Spirit in “Friendships Gallery” is a harbinger of the revisionary...