The modernist Orlando: Virginia Woolf’s refashioning of Ariosto’s Orlando furioso

Abstract

Virginia Woolf writes her novel Orlando: A Biography. Orlando is a rather unique work in Woolf's oeuvre: bordering on the fantastic, it begins with a young nobleman in sixteenth-century in England who lives about 300 years, inexplicably becomes a woman midway through his life, marries, gives birth and is only 36 years of age when the story ends in 1928, the very moment at which Woolf was writing it. The first part of Orlando includes a fictionalization of Vita's actual affair with a married woman, Violet Treyfusis. The other major subtext for Woolf's novel was Ariosto's chivalric epic Orlando furioso. In the Furioso, Orlando's greatest fear had been that someone else would come along and pluck the flower of Angelica's virginity before he got the chance. This modern Orlando unites the seemingly disparate qualities of masculinity and femininity in a way that prefigures his ultimate transformation from man to woman.