Euphrosyne Character Analysis

A noblewoman whom Orlando is engaged to marry early in the novel. Her real name is Lady Margaret, but Orlando refers to her only as Euphrosyne, a popular named used in Elizabethan poetry and the name Orlando uses for her in his sonnets. Euphrosyne is “fair, florid, and a trifle phlegmatic,” and she loves dogs. Orlando begins to ignore Euphrosyne after he falls in love with Sasha, and by the time Sasha leaves him and returns to Russia, Orlando is a disgrace at Court, and his marriage to Euphrosyne is off. Euphrosyne is the name of a ship in Woolf’s first novel, The Voyage Out, and it is the title of a book of poems written by Woolf’s husband, Leonard Woolf, and several other members of the Bloomsbury Group, an elite group of writers, artists, and philosophers during the early 20th century, of which Woolf was a member as well. While Orlando is a fictionalized biography of Vita Sackville-West, much of Woolf’s life and history is embedded in the novel as well, and Euphrosyne is evidence of such a connection. This personal connection to the novel underscores Woolf’s central argument that remaining completely objective while writing a biography is impossible.