Elle Pérez

Any attempt to document a life is limiting, but some are more limiting than others. Virginia Woolf’s novel Orlando is, like many novels, the story of a particular life. But it is also a kind of biography: a record of the life of Woolf’s friend and lover Vita Sackville-West.

Woolf knew a thing or two about biography;, that late Victorian institution for enshrining the contributions to culture of “great men.” Stephen oversaw the orderly collection of neat and potted narratives, from birth to death. Woolf, on the other hand, offers a very untidy life story indeed. begins in the sixteenth century and ends in Woolf’s present day. It insists that narrative form is challenged by other less respectable conventions: by magical metamorphoses, by new arrangements of composition, by modes of composure and comportment.