Vita-in-wonderland : life, fiction and the biographical tradition in Virginia Woolf's Orlando

Abstract

This dissertation sets out to investigate what I perceive to be an important, sometimes forgotten aspect of Virginia Woolf's writing: that of biography. My intentions were by no means to establish the premise of Woolf's writing as a mere symptom of the events and peculiarities of her life. I have often felt dissatisfied by such readings which in my eyes tend to undermine the literary value of Woolf s work by focusing too closely upon issues such as her mental illness, feminism or childhood abuse. I have, instead, attempted to explain Woolf s life-long interest in the literary form of biography as a result of her passionate engagement with what she calls 'life', and her interest in the characters and idiosyncrasies of the colourful personalities who surrounded her during her lifetime. This dissertation is predominantly a study of Virginia Woolf s highly original work, Orlando: A Biography. I have structured my argument in such a way as to illustrate Woolf's progression from the sphere of traditional biography to the magnificent tour-de-force that is Orlando. I have traced this development by referring closely to Woolf's own thoughts and concepts, which are so vividly recorded in her diaries, letters and essays, and which clearly show her as a writer on the path to a conscious stylistic emancipation, in constant search of a form of expression by which encapsulate the barely fathomable organism of life. It is interesting, then, that Woolf should write Orlando, a book about a writer in awe of life's ebbs and flows, also on a quest for a personal literary style. My research attempts to prove that the playful, eclectic and parodic style employed by Woolf in Orlando pre-empts in some ways some later self-conscious post-modern experiments, which similarly make a virtue out of blurring the distinctions between reality and fiction, life and literature.