ABSTRACT
Virginia Woolf's Orlando accomplishes Woolf's intended goal of "revolutionizing biography in a night" (Sackville-West 157) by shattering patriarchal biographic conventions at the same time it critiques sexual difference. Woolf's father, Leslie Stephen, became editor of the British Dictionary of National Biography (DNB) in 1882, the year of her birth. Stephen contributed 378 articles, or 1,000 pages of biography, to those volumes ("A Statistical Account" xxiv); the occasional tutoring he offered Virginia stressed biography as a foundation for literary study (Hill 351-53). According to Woolf,
Perhaps as a reckoning with her father's participation in the DNB as it affected her own life, "biographical revolution became part of what Woolf called 'the great Victorian fight ... of the daughters against the fathers'" (Cooley 71). Woolf's revision of biography in Orlando involves taking the conventions of biography her father so carefully performed and reified, and deconstructing them in a "seamy" narrative that problematizes "life-text" (the carefully but invisibly shaped cradle-ta-grave narrative of the subject's always already readable life), "biographical subject" (for whom sex and gender are always immediately presumed), and Ubiographer" (whose scrupulous objectivity and invisibility are generic).!
