Orlando’s Celebration of “prose not verse”

Abstract

In Woolf’s literary history, the eighteenth century saw the male writer and poetry begin to cede power and popularity to the female writer and the novel. Orlando (1928) personifies this literary history with the title character, a nobleman-poet who turns from man to woman in the eighteenth century, while his/her poetry turns from tolerable to bathetic. Some of the adventures of the newly female Orlando take their inspiration from the novels of Daniel Defoe and the life of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. Woolf draws on Defoe and Lady Montagu to underscore the mutual ascent of women and prose. Orlando is based primarily, of course, on Vita Sackville-West. Allusions in the novel to Sackville-West’s long poem The Land (1926) betray Woolf’s dim view of her lover’s poetry and the conventional, sentimental poet figure more generally, and argue that a woman poet after the eighteenth century writes in a form poorly suited to her era and her sex.