AULA ESCOLA EUROPEA
ENGLISH LANGUAGE DEPARTMENT
BATXILLERAT 2 STUDY GUIDE
ORLANDO
VIRGINIA WOOLF
Cover Illustration: Courttheater
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Virginia Woolf
FROM THE OXFORD DICTIONARY OF
NATIONAL BIOGRAPHY
Woolf [NÉE Stephen], (Adeline) Virginia
(1882–1941), writer and publisher, was born
Adeline Virginia Stephen on 25 January 1882
at 22 Hyde Park Gate, London. She was the
third child of Leslie Stephen (1832–1904), a
London man of letters and founding editor of
the
DICTIONARY
OF
NATIONAL
BIOGRAPHY, and his second wife, Julia
Prinsep Duckworth, NÉE Jackson (1846–
1895).
It was decided at an early age that Virginia
was to be a writer. Writing absorbed her, she
said, ‘ever since I was a little creature,
scribbling a story in the manner of Hawthorne
on the green plush sofa in the drawing room
at St. Ives [the family summer home] while the
grownups dined’ (V. Woolf, Diary, 19 Dec
1938). Virginia's bookishness drew her closer
to her father than his other children were. Her
mother caught her, at nine, twisting a lock of her hair as she read, in imitation of Leslie Stephen.
Virginia‘s mother died unexpectedly, at forty-nine, on 5 May 1895. Later, Virginia pictured herself as she
was at that time: an ‘emergent creature struck by successive blows as she sat with wings still creased
on the broken chrysalis’.
Leslie Stephen shaped Virginia's tastes, especially for biography. She picked up his reverential glow
balanced by humour. He taught her to pit observed truth against established paradigms, and that if
writing is to last it must have, for its backbone, some fierce attachment to an idea. But his deepest
influence on his daughter's writing may lie in his unorthodox tramps. Virginia, too, was a walker. As
though she were tracking a metaphor for her future work, she followed a natural path which ignored
artificial boundaries.
After her father's death in 1904 Virginia—together with siblings Vanessa, Thoby, and Adrian—left the
solid red brick of Kensington for the superb fadedness of Bloomsbury. At home Virginia Stephen played
up to the family's caricature of her as mad genius and helpless, scatty dependant of her sister. Yet she
was professional and direct as a teacher from 1905 to 1907 at Morley College, a night school for
workers in south London. As a writer, too, Virginia Stephen showed herself self-disciplined,
professional, prolific, and courageous. She examined the hidden moments and obscure formative
experiences in a life, rather than its more public actions.
In Gordon Square the two Stephen sisters brought together a group of innovative men whom Thoby
had known in Cambridge: Leonard Woolf (1880–1969), a stubborn, passionate man, alert to the ills of
society and with the practical sense to combat them; the biographer Lytton Strachey; the art critic Clive
Bell; the artists Roger Fry and Duncan Grant; the novelist E. M. Forster; and the economist John
Maynard Keynes. The shock of Thoby's death in 1906 sealed his sisters' ties to his friends. Vanessa
married Clive Bell in 1907, and the Stephens' Thursday evenings continued at 29 Fitzroy Square, where
Virginia and Adrian set up a separate home. This proved the beginning of the Bloomsbury group.
Bloomsbury abjured the chattiness of society for speculative silence; granted agency to women;
welcomed sexual freedom and homosexuality; and generally ridiculed the social, religious, and moral
orthodoxies of the Victorians.
Virginia, at thirty, married Leonard Woolf on 10 August 1912 in St Pancras town hall. The adjustment to
marriage, as well as fears for the publication of THE VOYAGE OUT, were the background to Virginia
Woolf's breakdowns in 1913 and 1915. In 1915 Miss Thomas, director of Burley, announced that
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Virginia's mind was ‘played out’ and persuaded her family that her character had permanently
deteriorated. But the doctors and nurses who believed there could be no full recovery were wrong. By
November 1915 she was ‘sane’. The twenty dark years were over, and the fertile stretch of her life
began.
From 1915 until 1924 the Woolfs lived quietly at Hogarth House, Richmond. There, in 1917, they set up
the Hogarth Press, at first as a hobby and with a view to publishing their own work. Soon, though, the
Hogarth Press became a publishing phenomenon, putting out some of the most advanced writing of the
day, including works by T. S. Eliot, Katherine Mansfield, E. M. Forster, Maynard Keynes, Gorki, Freud,
Robert Graves, Edith Sitwell, and of course the Woolfs themselves. At the time the press was
established Virginia Woolf was writing her second novel, NIGHT AND DAY.
From 1919 Virginia Woolf shaped the modern novel. She rejected the narrative coherence of Victorian
fiction in favour of ‘an ordinary mind on an ordinary day’, often several minds. Her aim was to find in the
‘moment of being‘ a climactic inward event, parallel to what her friend T. S. Eliot termed ‘unattended
moments’ and what James Joyce termed ‘epiphany’. Woolf and Eliot wished to cut through the
voluminousness of nineteenth-century writing in order to identify ‘the moment of importance’. Both
wished to cross the frontiers of consciousness where words fail. The Victorians had trusted language to
say just what they meant; the moderns found this impossible, and therefore communicated through
symbols—the lighthouse or the waves—which require a reciprocal effort on the part of the reader.
Virginia Woolf therefore gave fiction the depth of poetry.
Virginia Woolf entered the political arena with A ROOM OF ONE'S OWN (1929). The aim was to
establish a woman's tradition, recognizable through its distinct problems: the age-old confinement of
women to the domestic sphere, the pressures of conformity to patriarchal ideas, and worst, the denial of
income and privacy (‘a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write’). Virginia
Woolf wanted to retrieve rather than discard the traditions of womanhood. It suggested that women
excluded from historical record were the true makers of England as they passed their unnoticed code of
preservation from mother to daughter, cultivating domestic order and the arts of peace, as opposed to
militarized thugs who repeatedly destroyed it. Where the ‘woman question’ in the nineteenth century
was concerned largely with issues of the vote and education, Virginia Woolf became the leading
spokeswoman for the dominant issue of the twentieth century: professional advance. Her support for
the advancement of women co-existed with her readiness to love women. It was flirtatious rather than
physical, and she remained evasive and ambivalent about her sexual identity, but she adored,
romanced, mythologized, and wished to be petted by women, in particular the writer and gardener Vita
Sackville-West, where romance, from December 1925, was bound up with the amusement Virginia
Woolf found in the aristocracy. According to Vita, they made love only twice, despite many
opportunities. ORLANDO: A BIOGRAPHY (1928) celebrates Vita as a man-woman, switching gender to
endorse the androgynous creative mind through the ages.
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Vita Sackville-West
FROM THE OXFORD DICTIONARY OF NATIONAL
BIOGRAPHY
West, Victoria Mary [Vita] Sackville- (1892–1962), writer
and gardener, was born on 9 March 1892 at Knole near
Sevenoaks, Kent, the only child of Lionel Edward SackvilleWest (1867–1928), and his wife and first cousin, Victoria
Josefa Dolores Catalina Sackville-West (1862–1936),
society hostess, the illegitimate daughter of Sir Lionel
Sackville Sackville-West, second Baron Sackville (1827–
1908), and the Spanish dancer Josefa de la Oliva (NÉE
Durán y Ortega, known as Pepita). Her father succeeded
her grandfather as third Baron Sackville in 1908. She was
known throughout her life as Vita. Her upbringing, both
privileged and solitary, was shaped above all by the
romantic atmosphere and associations of Knole, the
sprawling Tudor palace set in a spacious park in Kent,
where she spent her childhood. Her literary taste and temperament were created substantially by this
aristocratic and historical backcloth and intensified both by the colourful and eccentric personality of her
mother and by the gradual realization, with which she never entirely came to terms, that as a woman
she could never inherit the Knole estate. Until she was thirteen she was educated by governesses at
home before moving to Miss Woolff's day school in London, but her voracious reading in literature and
history made her essentially an autodidact.
Sackville-West was also exposed to French culture from an early age through her mother's friendship
with Sir John Murray Scott, ultimate residuary legatee of the art collector Sir Richard Wallace and
owner of the Château de Bagatelle in Paris. Before the First World War she also enjoyed the
opportunity to travel to Italy, Russia, Poland, Austria, and Spain. Throughout her life these cosmopolitan
early years (which left the residue of fluency in Italian and French) were juxtaposed, and not without
tension, with a deep sense of rootedness within the Kent countryside. She began to write at an early
age and completed eight historical novels, five plays, and a number of poems before she was eighteen.
She privately published a verse drama about the poet Thomas Chatterton in 1909.
However, continual shadows played across her youth in both direct and indirect forms. Most publicly
there were two lawsuits that threatened the security and reputation of her family: in the first her mother's
relatives tried to prevent her father's inheritance of Knole, and in the second, where Vita was one of the
major witnesses, the relatives of Sir John Murray Scott tried to overturn his large bequest to Lady
Sackville on grounds of undue influence. Both were successfully overcome, but they took their toll on
her parents' marriage. These events, combined with her mother's increasingly manipulative and
emotionally quixotic behaviour, made the outwardly dominant and self-confident Sackville-West more
diffident and uncertain.
On 1 October 1913, despite conducting love affairs with women, Sackville-West married Harold George
Nicolson (1886–1968), son of Sir Arthur Nicolson (later Lord Carnock), at Knole. Sackville-West
retained her maiden name. Nicolson was at this stage in his career a junior diplomat, and they began
their married life in Constantinople, where he was currently posted. They returned to Britain in 1914 and
their first son, Lionel Benedict Nicolson, was born in August that year. They lived both in London and at
Long Barn, a house near Knole, which served as their country home between 1915 and 1930, where
Vita wrote most of her early books and developed her first garden. A second son was stillborn in 1915,
and their last child, Nigel Nicolson, was born in London in 1917. These years were crucial in three
respects—for the emergence across a range of genres of her professional literary persona; for the full
exploration of her sexual and emotional identity (what she called her dual nature); and perhaps above
all for the maturation of an unconventional but harmonious marriage.
Sackville-West, who signed all her books V. Sackville-West, published POEMS OF EAST AND WEST
in 1917, a collection of lyric poems composed while she was in Constantinople. In HERITAGE (1919),
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her first novel, she explored her own history through metaphors of genetic determinism, and in THE
HEIR (1922) she vented her feelings about Knole. KNOLE AND THE SACKVILLES (1922), a historical
work, found a large audience which continued once public access to stately homes began to increase.
In the years immediately after the First World War Sackville-West became committed to a stormy and
nearly self-destructive love affair with her school friend Violet Trefusis (1894–1972), daughter of Mrs
Alice Keppel, mistress of King Edward VII. The lovers travelled around Europe with Sackville-West
occasionally cross-dressed as a fictive persona, Julian. They collaborated on a novel, CHALLENGE
(1923), that was published in America under Sackville-West's name but suppressed in Britain. It is
dedicated to Violet and is about their relationship. Sackville-West very nearly left her husband
altogether. However, this crisis in fact proved eventually to be the catalyst for Nicolson and SackvilleWest to restructure their marriage satisfactorily so that they could both pursue a series of relationships
through which they could fulfil their essentially homosexual identity while retaining a secure basis of
companionship and affection. Sackville-West's other lovers included the journalist Evelyn Irons and
Hilda Matheson, head of the BBC talks department, and she was also very close to Virginia Woolf,
whom she met in December 1922. Sackville-West's SEDUCERS IN ECUADOR (1924) was written for
Woolf. Woolf returned the favour with her historical-fantasy novel ORLANDO (1928), a public love letter
and tribute to Sackville-West. The novel sums up with unique subtlety and perception Vita's own
multifaceted and sometimes discordant personality and her androgynous sexual appeal, historical
imagination, and love of Knole.
Knole House
Knole is an English country house in the
town of Sevenoaks in west Kent,
surrounded by a 1,000- acre (4.0 km2) deer
park. One of England's largest houses, it is
reputed to be a calendar house, having 365
rooms, 52 staircases, 12 entrances and 7
courtyards. It is remarkable in England for
the degree to which its early 17th-century
appearance is preserved, particularly in the
case of the state rooms: the exteriors and
interiors of many houses of this period, such
as Clandon Park in Surrey, were
dramatically
altered
later
on.
The
surrounding deer park is also a remarkable
survivor, having changed little over the past
400 years except for the loss of over 70% of its trees in the Great Storm of 1987.
The house was built by Thomas Bourchier, Archbishop of Canterbury, between 1456 and 1486, on the
site of an earlier house belonging to James Fiennes, the Lord Say and Sele who was executed after the
victory of Jack Cade's rebels at the Battle of Solefields. On Bourchier's death, the house was
bequeathed to the See of Canterbury — Sir Thomas More appeared in revels there at the court of John
Morton — and in subsequent years it continued to be enlarged, with the addition of a new large
courtyard, now known as Green Court, and a new entrance tower. In 1538 the house was taken from
Archbishop Thomas Cranmer by King Henry VIII along with Otford Palace.
In 1566, during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, it came into the possession of her cousin Thomas
Sackville whose descendants the Earls and Dukes of Dorset and Barons Sackville have lived there
since 1603 (the intervening years saw the house let to the Lennard family). Most notably, these include
writer Vita Sackville-West (her Knole and the Sackvilles, published 1922, is regarded as a classic in the
literature of English country houses); her friend and lover Virginia Woolf wrote the novel Orlando
drawing on the history of the house and Sackville-West's ancestors. The then laws of
primogeniture prevented Sackville-West herself from inheriting Knole upon the death of her father
Lionel (1867-1930), the 3rd Lord Sackville, and the estate and title passed to her uncle Charles (18701962).
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Terms and Themes
Terms
Themes
Genre
Gender
Biography
Identity
Modernism
Life and Death
Magical Realism
Memory and Past
Biographer
Society and Class
Narrator Point of View
Literature and Writing
Motif
Time
Setting
Love
Tone
Marriage
Symbol
Nature
Imagery
Fame
Allegory
Language
Protagonist
Nature vs. Art
Antagonist
History
Foil
Social Behaviour
Writing Style
Social Conformity
Stream of Consciousness
Morality
The Self
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Outline of Monarchs and English Writers
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Chapter 1
Part 1
1. Who is Orlando? Give a detailed description.
Nobleman, young, handsome, likes writing
16 year-old boy
2. Which two specific things are described in the house?
Oak tree and the big noble house
3. How does the narrator define the role of the biographer? How is this role
contradicted? Give examples.
A biographer should only narrate facts, and not emotions or thoughts of the person that is writing about.
In the book, the biographic role of the narrator contradicts this.
4. Describe the Elizabethan Age. How does it compare to that of the narrator’s?
It was a great nation, wherre arts and culture were developed and appreciated
5. What is said about nature and literature?
They don't get along
6. What’s the significance of the oak tree?
Stabilitym to be rooted and part of something
7. Describe the relationship between the Queen and Orlando. How do both parties
benefit from such a relationship?
Orlando has privileges, and the Queen feels younger when being next to Orlando
Part 2
1. Describe the Great Frost. What happened to the young country woman at Norwich?
to the wayfarers? What did it mean for the people in the big city?
Very cold period, during the late 17th century
2. Describe the meeting between Orlando and the Russian Princess. What do they
have in common? How do they differ?
They both could be men or women at the same time. He falls in love with her before knowing her sex.
They are the only ones that speak french.
3. Who is the Russian Princess named after? What does this foreshadow?
Fox ==> it means that she is not honest, he also describes her as a melon or an emerald
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4. Why is Orlando frustrated by the English language? What does he fail to capture?
He can't explain to Sasha what he wants. He can't find words to describe her.
5. What caused a scandal at Court?
The fact that Orlando flirted with Sasha while he was engaged with Euphrosine.
6. What happens aboard Sasha’s ship? What does Sasha say? Do you believe her?
Does Orlando?
7. Analyse the role of sun/light and moon/darkness in Sasha and Orlando’s romance.
Chapter 2
Part 1
1. According to our biographer, what is the first duty of a biographer? Why is Orlando’s
life difficult to chronicle?
2. What is Orlando’s current life situation?
3. What happened on Saturday June 18th?
4. What does the biographer take the time to reflect on?
5. Where does Orlando indulge in feelings of death and decay? What conclusions
does he arrive at?
6. Why does he break down sobbing in front of a painting?
7. What two diseases does Orlando suffer from? Why are they dangerous?
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8. Why is the pause before Orlando begins to write said to be of extreme significance
in his history? Orlando paused once before, what happened then? Can you predict
what will happen now? Who is now dancing around his heart? Like Thomas Brown,
what does Orlando wish to achieve?
9. What is said about memory? What analogy is used to describe it?
10. Why was Orlando happy for the first time since the great flood?
11. Who is Mr. Nicholas Greene? What’s he like? Why is Orlando disappointed when
he meets him?
12. What does Nick Greene reveal about poetry and the poets of his age?
13. Why does Nick Greene leave?
14. What’s Nick Greene’s opinion on “The Death of Hercules”?
15. Why does Orlando say he’s done with men?
Part 2
1. What does Orlando begin to frequent? What does he do there?
2. What is said about “time” and “memory”?
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3. Explain the metaphor of the lump of glass at the bottom of the sea.
4. What is said about nature and literature?
5. What oath does Orlando swear? How does it help him move on?
6. What new conclusions does he arrive at regarding fame?
7. What new project does he begin? What does he find is still missing when he is
finished?
8. When Orlando begins to revise his poem “The Oak Tree”. How has his writing
changed? What is this a sign of?
9. Who is the Archduchess Harriet? Why does he compare her to a hare? How is she
unconventional?
10. Is Orlando in love again?
11. What does Orlando decide to do?
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Chapter 3
1. What does the lack of reliable information during this period of Orlando’s life mean
for the biographer?
2. How does Constantinople compare to England?
Orlando finds Turkey quite different from the manor houses he has known in England, but he enjoys
Constantinople's wild, exotic quality. Though he has a magnetic quality that draws people to him, Orlando
finds no close friends in Constantinople.
3. What does the job of Ambassador entail for Orlando? Is he happy?
Orlando carries out his ambassadorial duties so well that King Charles gives him a dukedom, raising him to
the highest office of the peerage.
plus
4. Why is Orlando a legend?
Very popular above both genders
5. What happened when Orlando put on his new crown of Duke?
Moment when he decided that he was no longer a man, going into transition of 7 days
6. Who is Rosina Pepita?
A known gipsy dancer, as a Romani dancer, she is well below Orlando’s social status as a Duke.
Orlando's servants find him alone in his room, asleep, they wake him up and find a marriage license to Rosina
Pepita.
7. What roles do Purity, Chastity and Modesty play? How do they feel about Truth?
As Orlando lies in the trance, three figures enter: Lady of Purity, Lady of Chastity, and Lady of Modesty. They dance around
Orlando's body and try to claim him, but trumpets sound. They decide that this is a place for Truth and not for them, so they leave.
The trumpeters blast one note at Orlando, "the Truth" and he awakes. He stands upright, naked, and is now a woman.
8. What happens to Orlando? How does Orlando react?
Orlando is now a beautiful woman, with the strength of
a man and a the grace of a woman. Orlando is not at all
upset by this change.
stuck a pair of pistols in
her belt
her pearls => only way to
pay people, to show her
status
9. Where does Orlando go? With who? What does she take with her?
Orlando’s life with the Romani people reflects her grandmother’s life, who was some sort of peasant, and Orlando easily adapts
to their way of life. Orlando’s marriage to Rosina and her previous contact with the Romani people suggests that there is much
the reader doesn’t know about Orlando’s life, which again underscores the problem with biographies as Woolf see it.
10. Describe Orlando’s new life. How do Orlando’s and the gipsy’s view on nature
belonging
differ? On ancestry? On property?
Orlando finds truth in nature and worships it like a god or religion, but the Romani people don’t share
this particular view of truth.
11. What does Orlando miss most?
His house, England and the oak tree ==> poetry (only poem he takes with him), plus, oak tree represents
stability so he misses stability
12. How and why did Orlando decide to go home to England?
Orlando’s aristocratic heritage is part of
her identity, like writing and poetry, and
she therefore can’t abandon it.
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METAPHORS
Chapter 4
Part 1
1. What benefits and disadvantages of both sexes does Orlando think about on her
way home to England on the Enamoured Lady?
2. What are some things that, as a woman, Orlando is now enjoying?
3. As a man, how did Orlando expect women to be? What does she think about this
now that she is a woman?
4. What things must Orlando give up now that she is a woman? What must she now
embrace?
5. Why does she consider returning to Turkey to live with the gipsy’s again?
6. Does feminine compliance to male domination comes with certain rewards?
7. What does Orlando think about Sasha now?
8. How does Orlando feel when arriving to England?
9. How has London changed while she has been away?
10. What legal problems does Orlando encounter upon her arrival?
11. How is Orlando received in her country home? Is there any confusion because of
her sex change?
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12. What are Orlando’s thoughts on religion?
13. What is revealed about the Archduchess Harriet?
14. “In short, they acted the parts of man and woman for ten minutes with great vigour
and then fell into natural discourse.” Comment / explain.
15. Why is the engagement broken?
16. What’s Orlando looking for?
17. According to the text, what effect do clothes have on us? Do you agree? Orlando
now feels like a woman. Why? Did she feel like a woman amongst the gipsies? Why
/ why not?
Orlando takes to switching genders, and dons male or female clothes depending upon which is more
appropriate for the moment. She finds that living in two genders is doubly fulfilling. She uses her male persona
to eavesdrop on interesting conversations in coffee houses, like those of Dr. Johnson and Mr. Boswell.
18. What is said about the difference between the sexes?
Part 2
1. How did the Archduke rescue Orlando?
2. What is said about society? Explain the comparison with dogs.
3. Having denounced society, why does Orlando visit Lady R?
4. Describe the gathering at Lady R’s.
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5. What is the role of light and darkness in Orlando and Mr Pope’s drive home?
6. What does Orlando learn about Pope, Addison, and Swift?
7. What happened while Orlando was pouring tea for Pope?
8. Where does Orlando go after meditating under the willow tree? How is she
dressed?
9. According to the text, what do women desire?
10. Why was it difficult for the biographer to chronicle Orlando’s life after this?
11. What is the black cloud that covers London?
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Chapter 5
1. How has the black cloud changed England? What is the biographer implying?
What happened to the light? What does the damp represent? What happened to
the sexes? How has the life of the average woman changed? What about
literature? What vision does Orlando have? How might you interpret this?
2. How does the Spirit of the Age affect Orlando?
3. While reading “The Oak Tree”, what conclusions does Orlando arrive at?
4. What fantastic thing happens as she attempts to write?
5. Describe how Orlando came to meet Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine, Esquire.
6. How are Orlando’s lawsuits resolved?
7. Why do Orlando and Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine, Esquire question each
other’s sex?
8. Why does Orlando call Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine, Esquire by so many
names? What do they mean? Who are they a reflection of?
9. What happened at the end of the chapter?
10. Compare Sasha to Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine, Esquire. How different are
the relationships Orlando had with both?
11. Discuss Shell and Orlando’s relationship with regard to Nature and their nature (pun
intended).
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Chapter 6
Part 1
1. How does the conflict between Orlando and the Spirit of the Age resolve itself?
2. What are Orlando’s concerns about her marriage?
3. What problem does the biographer face now?
4. In what tone does the biographer talk about women writers? What does she say?
What does she imply?
5. What does the biographer say about life?
6. What has Orlando finished? What does it want?
7. In Orlando’s visit to London, what changes does she perceive? Who does she run
into? How has he changed? How has he remained the same?
8. Why is Orlando disappointed as a result of this meeting?
9. What does this critic think of “The Oak Tree”?
10. What is Rattigan Glumphoboo?
Something in the language of Shel and Orlando
11. What question does she ponder ten minutes after reading Green’s article?
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12. What does Orlando see in the Serpentine? What does she conclude as a
consequence?
13. Back in her home in London, what conclusions does she arrive at about Victorian
literature?
14. What is stream of consciousness?
Lots of information coming without any filters
15. What happens at the end of the section?
She has a baby
"the Kingfisher"
Part 2
It is also Mrs Banting who voices the culmination of any woman’s desire, according
to Freud, i.e., the birth of a son, possessor of the phallus, which she can never
hope to embody. But the son in Orlando is reduced to a silent, almost abstract
concept of no importance at all. Chief protagonist in the birth scene is the
kingfisher, whose coming, like the coming of the baby, demands patience and
composure. The desire for a son is displaced in the text into the expectation of the
kingfisher, symbol of serenity and calmness after the storm.
1. As Orlando looks out the window, she contemplates how England changes again.
What changes does she perceive? What year is it?
2. What does Orlando reflect on at the department store?
3. Who does she spot while shopping for sheets? What does she cry out?
4. Orlando is having trouble with time. Explain.
5. According to the biographer, who are the successful people in life?
6. What does the biographer say about the different selves?
7. What new limitations on the genre of biography does the biographer point out?
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8. What continually brings Orlando back to the present while in reveries? Is this a
running motif during the novel? Have we seen it before?
9. Why doesn’t Orlando bury her poem at the foot of the oak tree?
10. At the end when she looks into the darkness what happens? Why does she cry out
“Ecstasy!”? What is the wild goose?
11. What is emphasized about time in this chapter / book?
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