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phrase of Wallace Stevens’s ‘more truly and more strange’. And specifically, the history Woolf herself had always defined as ‘masculine’ here becomes ‘feminine’, too – becomes, indeed, what the writer had heretofore implicitly defined as a contradiction in terms: a public history of the private woman – as Orlando, returning at last from Turkey to reclaim her English inheritance, becomes England’s figurative land-lady: the Lady Or-land-o,
Ur
-land-o, Her-land-o.
    That
Orlando
did begin as, and at base really is, a fantasy biography/family history of a particular woman Virginia Woolf loved is certainly also relevant here, not just because the novelist wanted to flatter and immortalize her friend, not just because that friend was the wife of the theorist of biography Harold Nicolson, but also because her commonly used nickname, Vita, means ‘life’, so that the
Vita Nuova
Woolf devised for her fancifully suggests the New Life that is the Life of the New Woman. Therefore, just as many of the illustrations scattered throughout the book are pictures of Vita herself or of her Sackville ancestors, many details of the plot reflect significant details of Vita’s actual biography: her early impassioned affair with Violet Trefusis (who here becomes the Russian Sasha because Vita called her ‘Lushka’); her Spanish grandmother (here, as in real life, ‘Rosina Pepita’); her courtship by the foolish aristocrat Lord Lascelles (here the Duke/Duchess of Scand-op-Boom); her travels in the East (here the Turkish episode): her transvestism (here the eighteenth-centuryescapades); her winning of the Hawthornden Prize for ‘The Land’ (here the winning of the ‘Burdett Coutts Prize’ for ‘The Oak Tree’); her legal fight for her ancestral property (here, as in real life, her Great Law Suit); her marriage to the supportive bisexual Harold Nicolson (here called Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine); and so forth. 28
    Equally important, Woolf’s fantastic transformations of these details function to empower Vita. Thus this fictional
Vita Nuova
grants her not just the one ‘life and a lover’ she asks for as Orlando but many lives and many lovers. Thus, too, because Vita had grown up feeling like a boy – even, during the height of her affair with Violet Trefusis, posing as a wounded soldier named ‘Julian’ – and haunted by anxiety about her ‘dual’ sexuality, Woolf assures her that, yes, if she felt like a boy she was a boy. In fact, as if responding to the hope Vita expressed in her (then unpublished) autobiography that ‘as centuries go on… the sexes [will] become more nearly merged on account of their increasing resemblances’, 29 Woolf suggests in her simultaneous revision of history and sexuality that centuries have indeed gone on and the sexes have merged, or were never wholly separated – for ‘Different though the sexes are, they intermix’ (p. 132). Thus, finally, where Vita was ultimately barred from inheriting Knole, the Sackville estate, because of her sex, Woolf grants her perpetual possession of this house so that at last the dispossessed man/woman has not one but 365 rooms of her own – a figure whose symbolic cast, even if based on the extravagant reality of Knole, implies that he/she has inherited not just a place in time but time itself. 30
    As a ‘theory of biography’, then,
Orlando
is also both a comment on history and a meditation on time. To begin with, in her role as a sort of metabiographer – a writer who both deploys and criticizes the form in which she is working – Woolf wittily parodies the intrusive and often absurd speculations of the scholar who presumes to know the ‘truth’ about the ‘life’ and ‘self’ of his subject. Each of us, she argues, as she endows Orlando with a host of costumes and careers, has many ‘lives’and many ‘selves’. Nor can they ever, in their multiplicity, be properly understood by the voyeuristic researcher. In relegating some of