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Some days they are one, some days they are the other; some days they are neither; some days they are both.
Why did Virginia make this choice? When they are not writing intensively about the queer experience, Jerakah can be found baking chocolate pies and hiding from tornadoes.
Art courtesy Christiaan Tonnis under Creative Commons.
Modernist English authors, such as Virginia Woolf in her novel Orlando: A Biography, built upon a pre-existing and long tradition of underground lesbian literature dating back to Sappho in Ancient Greece.
It took me a while to open up to her, but once I did, I fell in love, and I’m not the only one. Very mixed." When it comes to their letters to each other, though, they don’t shy away from talking about the physical side of sapphism. Queer identities didn’t mean in Woolf’s day what they do now, and they certainly didn’t in the eras Orlando takes place in.
The affection is so warming; they really, really loved each other.
However, as this witty reimagining suggests, the dynamic between the two women was interesting.
When we first see Orlando, Virginia goes on and on about how stunning he is—“happy the mother who bears, happier still the biographer who records the life of such a one!” His red cheeks were “covered with peach down; the down on his lips was only a little thicker than the down on his cheeks.
The lips themselves were short and slightly drawn back over teeth of an exquisite and almond whiteness.” And, true to form, she goes on for an entire page. I composed a beautiful letter to you in the sleepless nightmare hours of the night, and it has all gone. For instance, I like to say that Shakespeare was bisexual, but the truth is that Elizabethans never would have considered their sexual identities in those terms.
The plot is complicated; Orlando switches genders about halfway through the novel, though this gives the character little pause. She never wastes a chance to tell us how beautiful Orlando is. Today, we’d call it ghosting—but their relationship did not end; it evolved. A woman scorns them in love, and after cursing women and running off to the Middle East to find themself for a couple of centuries (as one does), Orlando awakes as a woman.
Upon their return to England, reveling in their new woman-body, Orlando (as they often do) becomes lost in their thoughts, taking time to think of the pros and cons of being man or woman:
“And here it would seem from some ambiguity in her terms that she was censuring both sexes equally, as if she belonged to neither; and indeed, for the time being she seemed to vacillate; she was man; she was woman; she knew the secrets, shared the weaknesses of each.”
“She seemed to vacillate.” To me, it is clear—in our twenty-first century terms, Orlando is genderfluid.
I love Virginia Woolf because of who she loved and the way she loved her. Most recently, they have had prose and poetry nominated for Pushcart Prizes in 2019 for pieces published in Crabfat Magazine and Impossible Archetype. They wrote to each other constantly, often in awe (and sometimes jealous) of the other’s writing.
Vita’s open relationship with her husband Harold Nicolson is described by their son Nigel in Portrait of a Marriage, but can also be glimpsed in the evocative extracts of their letters included in this collection: "Darling, there is no muddle anywhere!" Vita writes to Harold, a week after telling Virginia that she loves her, "I have gone to bed with her (twice), but that’s all." (That’s all!)
'If Virginia and Vita had had smartphones, what a stream of sexting acronyms would sift through our fingers'
Instead of lesbian, gay or bisexual, the term most commonly used by Vita and Virginia to describe their "proclivities" is "Sapphist": a euphemism after Sappho, an ancient poet of sensual verse about women, who lived on the Greek island of Lesbos (inspiring, too, the word ‘lesbian’).
All I know is that when I read Orlando for the first time, I had just come out of the closet as nonbinary.