ABSTRACT
On October 5, 1927, Virginia Woolf began writing Orlando (1928), a fictional biography based on a real person, which she would later recall having begun “as a joke.” In the wake of biography’s deterioration in the nineteenth century, Woolf identifies new signs that the genre’s poetics have been accurately recast to place appropriate emphasis on the imagination. The Dictionary of National Biography, edited by Woolf’s father, Sir Leslie Stephen, for sixteen years beginning in 1885, served Woolf well as a source of fertilizing resistance. Lyndall Gordon’s Virginia Woolf: A Writer’s Life (1984) defines itself as the critical complement to Vanessa Bell’s personal history biography. Phyllis Rose, in Woman of Letters: A Life of Virginia Woolf (1978), defines literary biography as an exploration of the artist’s “inner life” and “imaginative world.” In Roger Fry , Woolf, like her predecessors Samuel Johnson and James Boswell, underscores the value of autobiography, its priority and even superiority to biography.
