The First Orlando: The Laugh of the Comic Spirit in Virginia Woolf's "Friendships Gallery" - Critical Essay

Twentieth Century Literature, Spring, 2001 by Karin E. Westman

"Friendships Gallery" is only one of several biographical sketches that Woolf, as an aspiring chronicler of the past, [2] composed for family and friends or for general publication in advance of her more famous and irreverent Orlando. When we hear that Woolf had been asked by F.W. Maitland to contribute to his biography of her father Sir Leslie Stephen, a man whose name had become synonymous with the compendious Dictionary of National Biography, we might expect Woolf to have felt as burdened by her literary past as her character Katharine Hilbery in Night and Day (1920), who labors at her grandfather's biography, "half-crushed" by the weight of "the great poet, Richard Alardyce" (15), and his many letters and manuscripts. Yet far from suffering under the weight of this legacy, Woolf repeatedly adapts her inheritance to her own literary and feminist goals. [3] Like her travel journals and earliest fiction, Woolf's biographical sketches [4] put into practice a more "proper writing of lives" than she had found i n the many histories, biographies, and memoirs she reviewed during these same years, a method that questioned patriarchal ideology by questioning the established methods of biographical writing. In her biographies, Woolf chose to emphasize individual voices from the past, to advocate storytelling as a way to recover those voices and bodies of the past for the contemporary reader, and, perhaps most importantly, to avoid historians' and biographers' replication of a patriarchal ideology of separate spheres, in which men's lives turn on their active engagement with the social world, and women's lives turn on their passive appearance and the "invisible" work they accomplish within the home. [5] Acknowledging her independent, subjective perspective by writing herself into the biographical text, Woolf continually pursues the individual character of her subjects by re-presenting their speech and thoughts as well as their actions, so that the historical past lives again in the reader's present experience. Her biograp hical sketches anticipate the need to balance the "truth of real life and the truth of fiction," the hallmark of what Woolf will identify as the new art of biography ("The New Biography" [1927], 154); their narrative forms illustrate a dialogic writing of lives commensurate with her feminist goals. In "Friendships Gallery," however, we can see Woolf altering the balance from historical narrative (the "truth of real life") to the possibilities of fiction (the "truth of fiction"), as her writing notebooks confirm. [6] "Friendships Gallery" therefore provides a crucial link in our understanding of Woolf's development as a feminist materialist artist, one concerned with economic relations and with the life of the body and the mind within a patriarchal culture.

When "Friendships Gallery" was first discovered, however, the sketch was quickly linked with Woolf's better-known mock biography of another female friend, Vita Sackville-West, and it has since shared a critical fate similar to Orlando's within the Woolf canon of literary works. [7] The prevailing critical evaluation of Orlando read Woolf's novel through the lens of Nigel Nicholson's oft-quoted line "the longest and most charming love letter in literature." [8] Woolf's biographical sketch of Violet Dickinson is introduced in similar terms by Ellen Hawkes, who edited the previously unpublished sketch for Twentieth Century Literature in 1979. In Hawkes's introduction, "Friendships Gallery" becomes "an early example of Virginia Woolf's way of expressing her affection and admiration for a woman friend"--a "spoof biography of Violet Dickinson [that] begins and ends in love" (270). [9] While both "Friendships Gallery" and Orlando are certainly motivated, as Woolf's letters and diary entries bear Out, by the "affecti on and admiration" Woolf felt "for a woman friend," this perspective limits the critical import of the particular stories each "biography" tells, and, in the case of Orlando, inappropriately limits the intended audience for the book. Both texts become only "love letters," to be read more for the affection conveyed rather than for the form and content of the narratives told.