Some -- Books of the - .Week -
Mas. Woon? would seem, like the hero of her new book, Orlando (Hogarth Press, 9s.), to have more than one self. The biographer of Orlando is very different from the pure harmoni- ous artist of Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse. In some of Mrs. Woolf's shorter sketches you catch the echo of an uncanny Mirth in the upper air ; and that elvish glee sounds dis- quietingly in the pauses of this fantastic chronicle. Orlando begins as a young Elizabethan noble with roses on his shoes, holding rosewater- for the sick queen, already ashen in her cloth of gold. He finds his Russian princess, strange as an emerald, in the great ice-carnival of King James' time, and departs to be Extraordinary Ambassador at Constantinople, though Nell Gwynn admires his legs. After a sumptuous period there, he falls into a trance during an insurrection, and-wakes a woman. So Mrs. Woolf announces, with an aerial derision none is likely to defy. She slips from generation to generation, enjoying the society of the Queen Anne period, in the dress of both man and woman. Finally, we leave her in the wood, receiving her husband from the skies this very month of October. The historic passages are extraordinarily vivid ; they sound like personal reminiscence. In the earlier part the prose sometimes swings into the sombre cadence of Sir Thomas Browne. Orlando is an enchanting figure, all dreams and glamour, such a creature as does appear and reappear in the generations of some ancient families ; and the abiding presence of his great house, " couched in the meadows," and large as a town, affords him a continuity of background. The photographs do not seem to be quite in unison with the text, though one or two are charming. The note of private mystification is out of place in a work so -witty, audacious, and distinguished.
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