Orlando Read Free

and lesbianism not only practised but openly discussed; adulterous liaisons becoming an accepted part of the family circle;
ménages à trots, à quatre, à cinq;
and all this happening shortly after the death of Queen Victoria, among people raised by the old rules. 10
    Woolf’s sister Vanessa, for instance, married Clive Bell but had a long affair with the art historian Roger Fry and, after bearing Bell two sons, had a daughter by the painter Duncan Grant, with whom she settled into an amicable lifelong partnership.
    Woolf’s friend Lytton Strachey, to whom she was briefly engaged at one point, had numerous homosexual relationships, although he too settled into a long living-arrangement, in his case with Dora Carrington, a young woman who adored him, and her husband, Ralph Partridge, whom
he
adored.
    Although the young Virginia Stephen tended to be an observer rather than a participant in these unconventional sexual configurations, her own feelings were never stifled by convention. As Quentin Bell observes, for example, she was clearly in love with Violet Dickinson, to whom she wrote ‘passionate letters, enchanting, amusing, embarrassing… from which one tries to conjure up a picture of the recipient’. 11 And, in fact, long before she had conceived the Sapphic tale of ‘The Jessamy Brides’ which was to metamorphose into
Orlando,
Woolf had depicted love between women with special fervour in her novels. Rachel Vinrace, the heroine of
The Voyage Out
(1915), develops a keen attachment to her friend and mentor Helen Ambrose, while Katharine Hilbery, the protagonist of
Night and Day
(1919), and the suffragist Mary Datchet are drawn together, and the painter Lily Briscoe, a major character in
To the Lighthouse,
is enthralled by Mrs Ramsay, the powerfully maternal figure who dominates the work.
    Most strikingly, Clarissa Dalloway, the eponymous heroine of
Mrs. Dalloway
(1925), remembers the moment when her girlhood friend Sally Seton kissed her on the lips as the supreme erotic experience of her life and muses on her feelings for women in one of the most explicitly sexual passages Woolf ever wrote:
    … she could not resist sometimes yielding to the charm of a woman, not a girl, of a woman confessing, as to her they often did, some scrape, some folly… she did undoubtedly then feel what men felt. Only for a moment; but it was enough. It was a sudden revelation, a tinge like a blush which one tried to check and then, as it spread, one yielded to its expansion, and rushed to the farthest verge and there quivered and felt the world come closer, swollen with some astonishing significance, some pressure of rapture, which split its thin skin and gushed and poured with an extraordinary alleviation over the cracks and sores! Then, forthat moment, she had seen an illumination; a match burning in a crocus; an inner meaning almost expressed. But the close withdrew; the hard softened. It was over – the moment. 12
    ‘She did undoubtedly then feel what men felt.’ Although this remark seems casual enough, what underlay it – and what would have given particular force to Woolf’s attraction to Sapphism as well as to the fascination with transvestism and transsexualism so centrally dramatized in
Orlando
– was the rise in the early years of the century of the new enterprise of ‘sexology’, whose discourse complemented and supplemented the equally new (and equally sexualized) discourse of psychoanalysis that had now been taken up by so many of the writer’s contemporaries. Where Victorian thinkers had preached that ‘proper’ masculinity and femininity were inborn, that sexuality was essentially immutable, the sexologists and their disciples began to call attention to both the fluidity and the artifice of gender.
    Edward Carpenter, an open homosexual and the foremost British prophet of this way of thinking, argued in the 1890s for what he saw as the Utopian existence of a ‘third’ or ‘Intermediate Sex’, whom he called