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she noted in her diary on 31 May – ‘about more interesting things, & with more attachment to life, & larger… He says it is very original.’ 34
    Nor was Leonard Woolf eccentric among the novel’s early readers, for in his wife’s own words, ‘The reception [of
Orlando
] surpassed expectations’, 35 in newspapers and magazines on both sides of the Atlantic. Writing for the
New York Herald Tribune,
the feminist novelist and essayist Rebecca West defined the work as ‘a poetic masterpiece of the first rank’, 36 an encomium which left Woolf feeling ‘a little sheepish and silly’, while other, equally enthusiastic critics praised Woolf’s ‘swift and sparkling prose’, her ‘delicious’ fantasy, her ‘exquisite’ poetry, and her ‘wit thatplays like summer lightning’. ‘Never, perhaps, has Mrs Woolf written with more verve: certainly she has never imagined more boldly,’ pronounced
The Times Literary Supplement.
And though pre-publication orders for the book had been disheartening because, as Woolf explained to herself in her diary, ‘No one wants biography’ 37 – not even, evidently, mock biography – post-publication sales were the strongest Woolf had ever had. ‘L. has just been in to consult about a 3rd edition of Orlando,’ she noted in December 1928, adding that ‘we have sold over 6,000 copies; & sales are still amazingly brisk –150 today for instance; most days between 50 & 60; always to my surprise.’ In fact, the success of Woolf’s literary ‘escapade’ marked a turning point in her professional career. At last, she was able to decide, ‘my room is secure. For the first time since I married… I have been spending money.’ 38
    In the last few decades, however, a number of Woolf scholars and critics have tended to value
Orlando
less highly than its early readers did. Quentin Bell, for example, damns the work with faint praise as ‘easy, amusing, and straightforward in its narrative’. Although he concedes that ‘of all Virginia’s novels [this is] the one that comes nearest to sexual, or rather to homosexual, feeling,’ he characterizes its protagonist as ‘near… to the glamorous creations of the novelette’. 39 Adopting a similar tone, Alex Zwerdling dismissively observes that in
Orlando
‘such serious Woolfian themes as androgyny, the passage of time, and artistic dedication are rather archly guyed’, while Jane Marcus curtly remarks that ‘more than “kind explanation” is needed to see in it a modern myth of historical development, what Rebecca West called the “high fountain” of genius’, and most recently John Batchelor judges it ‘not… a major work’ but rather ‘an experiment with a negative result’. 40 And indeed, despite the encomia of reviewers, Woolf herself had by November 1929 scornfully described the book as not just a ‘freak’ but, worse, ‘mere child’s play’. 41
    Yet Woolf’s initial sense of
Orlando
as ‘extraordinarily unwilled’ but ‘potent in its own right… as if it shoved everythingaside to come into existence’ should not be discounted. For besides being a happy ‘escapade’, a charming ‘love letter’, an exuberant analysis of gender roles and a witty meditation on history, this work occupies a particularly interesting and ‘potent’ position in Woolf’s
oeuvre
: she began to contemplate
Orlando
shortly after she had completed
To the Lighthouse,
the elegiac examination of the traditional upper middle class Victorian family that was at least in part intended to exorcize the ghosts of her own parents, her own past; and after finishing
Orlando
she commented that ‘I want to write a history, say of Newnham or the women’s movement, in the same vein’, 42 then turned almost immediately to her first major feminist treatise,
A Room of One’s Own.
In a sense, it can be argued,
Orlando
functions as a crucial bridge between these two superficially very different texts.
    Woolf herself understood quite well the