Updated October 16, 2000
Created July 31, 1998
Does Woolf base any characters in Orlando on real people?
Orlando - Orlando is based on Vita Sackville-West, the woman whom Lee describes as "the central relationship of [Woolfs] forties" (515). Orlandos life traces the history of Vita Sackville-Wests family, up to the present day, when Vita was unable to inherit her family estate because she was a woman. Most of the photographs are of Vita or members of her family (see key to illustrations) . Orlando is age 36 at the end of the book, Vitas age in 1928. [Note, Orlando is age 30 when he becomes a woman; Vita was 30 when she met Virginia; when Virginia was 30, she married Leonard]. However, Lee corrects a too-simple identification of Vita and Orlando:
"Vitas class, her ancestral house, her looks, her sensuality, her resistance to convention, her travels, her unusual marriage her writing: all that is in the biography. It is a knowing, loving, private message. . . . [Yet it also parodies Vita and is in some ways cruel.] Vita is made love to, but she is also made over; her characteristics are exploited. Where Vita was romantic, private and gloomy, Orlando is showy, glittering, witty and camp. . . . Where Vitas taste is conservative and snobbish, Orlando is anarchic and socially unsettling. Orlandos (and Orlandos) feminism isof coursemuch more Virginia Woolfs than Vitas" (516).
Sasha - based on Violet Trefusis, with whom Vita had a widely publicized fling in 1918-20 (their husband flew to Paris to bring them back. For different versions, see Vitas novel Challenge (1923; suppressed in U.K.) and Nigel Nicolsons account in Portrait of a Marriage (1973).
Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine - mostly a fantasy character (his photo in the book is from an anonymous man), but with resemblances to Vitas husband, Harold Nicolson. Orlando calls Shelmerdine by the the same pet name Vita used for Harold, "Mar." Like Nicolson, Shelmerdine is away most of the time, and once Nicolson landed at Knole in an airplane. (That's his photo at left.)
Archduke Harry - based on Henry, Lord Lascelles (1882-1974), one of Vitas suitors.