Books: Breeches to Crinolines

ORLANDO—A Biography—Virginia Woolf—Harcourt Brace ($2.50).

The Story. To race on the tide of five centuries, to be a man for a while and know the thrill of mastery, to be a woman for a spell and know the subtler ecstasy of submission, to grow older in understanding without losing bodily vigor or mental finesse—this is the enviable life, and this is the life of Orlando.

Sixteenth Century. Orlando knelt in crimson breeches, offering the Queen a bowl of rose water before she dined. He saw her crabbed sickly hand flash with heavy jewels; she saw his dark curls bent so reverently, and that night deeded him the great monastic manor that had belonged to the Archbishop, then to Henry VIII. Orlando scribbled five-act tragedies, a dozen histories, a score of sonnets, until the Queen summoned him to Whitehall. Chains of office, jewelled Garter, sad embassy to the Queen of Scots, but from the bitter Polish Wars Elizabeth detained her darling. Her old heart broke when in a mirror she watched him make merry with a court wanton.

Early Seventeenth Century. Came the Great Frost: the new King celebrated his coronation with an ice carnival on the frozen Thames, and there Orlando fell passionately in love with a Muscovite Princess. His verse likened her to a pineapple, an emerald, a fox in the snow; and for weeks their bliss was the gossip of the icebound court. Then she jilted him, and he went into a trance.

Middle Seventeenth Century. Writer-folk had always filled him with awe: he patronized a hack-writer till the scurrilous wag wrote a lucrative burlesque on his patron’s foppish existence. King Charles thereupon gave Orlando escape as Ambassador Extraordinary to Constantinople though Nell Gwyn regretted that such a pair of legs should leave the country.

Eighteenth Century. Returned to England in skirts, Orlando attended Queen Anne’s brilliant balls; flirted with Mr. Pope, sipped tea with Addison and Steele, reflecting that future generations, little guessing her boredom, would envy her the intimacy.

Nineteenth Century. Victoria’s cream-colored ponies trotted up the avenue with a command for Orlando to dine; Lady Palmerston and Mrs. Gladstone left cards, but bored Orlando withdrew to the woods with her lover. True, she solemnly married him and bore her first child—but such was the irresistible convention of the crinoline age.

Twentieth Century. She motors into town with her shopping list—sardines, bath salts, boots — but hurries back to her country seat (same monastic manor) and sits on Queen Bess’s chair, brushes her short hair with King James’ silver brushes, bounces up and down on his sacrosanct bed.

The Significance. Audacious as it is masterly, the conception of a young hero-heroine living richly century after century is a feat of imaginative intelligence. In unskilled hands the bold conception might well fall short of artistic execution, but Mrs. Woolf is a craftsman of great skill. The mechanics of sex-transformation and passage of time are deftly, almost blandly, subordinated to the phenomenon of one and the same temperament reacting to the characteristics of disparate ages. Orlando is influenced by each new mode, but vivid memories give him (her) a dispassionate perspective. The sweep of generations offers every opportunity for satiric commentary; the experience of both sexes an admirable occasion for comparison. Mrs. Woolf seizes opportunity and occasion.

The Author. More interested in mono type and printer’s ink than vacuum-cleaners and Patou models, Virginia Woolf — and her husband — set up a small hand press in 1912, and printed limited editions of choice books, her own among them. Since then, the Hogarth Press has grown, through success, to a full-fledged publishing house with appropriate offices near the British Museum.

Rather more “literary” than the commercialized publisher and critic of the U. S., Mr. and Mrs. Woolf belong to a group of individualists who still take art seriously: Orient-student Arthur Waley (TIME, Aug. 27), Economist John Maynard Keynes, Biographer Lytton Strachey, esoteric Poet Osbert Sitwell, unique Author E. M. Forster. Many of these were at Cambridge together, have since formed the “Bloomsbury group,” intermarrying, settling in adjacent houses, exciting themselves in common interests. Virginia Woolf is daughter to the Cambridge tutor and biographer Sir Leslie Stephen, sister-in-law to art critic Clive Bell, wife to Leonard Woolf, publisher, critic and literary editor of the Nation.