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Summary
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Orlando, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Writing and Literature
Subjectivity, Truth, and Biography
Gender and Society
Identity and Transformation
Summary
Analysis
“Many friends have helped me in writing this book,” Woolf writes. “Some are dead and so illustrious that I scarcely dare name them, yet no one can read or write without being perpetually in the debt of Defoe, Sir Thomas Browne, Sterne, Sir Walter Scott, Lord Macaulay, Emily Brontë, De Quincey, and Walter Pater,—to name the first that come to mind.” Woolf thanks others who are still living, but they “are less formidable for that very reason,” she says. She thanks Madame Lopokova, the wife of J. M. Keynes, for assisting with the Russian language and Mr. Roger Fry for helping her understand art. Woolf is also indebted to her nephew, Julian Bell, and her brother-in-law, Clive Bell, for their “inspiring” criticism.
Woolf’s preface is largely a list of people she would like to thank, and the fact that she begins with the famous writers who have influenced her reflects the importance of literature, both in the novel and in Woolf’s own life. Sir Thomas Browne is referenced throughout the book and Woolf later references Emily Brontë and Laurence Sterne as well. Woolf implies that death makes one more “formidable,” or illustrious, and this preoccupation with death and dying is later seen in the character of Orlando, especially in the crypt of his family’s estate.
Themes
Woolf also acknowledges her mother-in-law and Mr. and Mrs. T. S. Eliot, as well as Lytton Strachey, E. M. Forster, and Harold Nicolson for their assistance and support in writing Orlando. She thanks her sister, Vanessa Bell, and her niece and nephew, Angelica and Quentin Bell, as well as the British Museum and Record Office for their “wonted courtesy.” In closing, Woolf thanks a “gentleman in America, who has generously and gratuitously corrected the punctuation, the botany, the entomology, the geography, and the chronology” of Woolf’s previous works. “I hope,” Woolf writes, “[he will] not spare his services on the present occasion.”
Woolf thanks most of the people belonging to the Bloomsbury Group, and those closely associated with it; however, whom Woolf thanks isn’t nearly as important as whom she doesn’t. Vita Sackville-West, whom Orlando is a fictionalized biography of, isn’t mentioned at all in the preface, even though Woolf thanks upwards of 50 other people. Woolf does dedicate the book to Sackville-West, but the dedication is the only time Woolf explicitly mentions her.
Themes
