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With so many fine reviews and studies on Woolf's Orlando, what could I write about?

The name? Possibly. After all, I picked this to read now precisely because of the name. The title. I am in an Orlandising phase. Orlando Innamorato, Orlando Furioso, Calvino's Ariosto's Orlando FuriosoHandel and Vivaldi with their Orlando, Ariodante, Alcina��, and then Doré, Ingres, Tiepolo�� Woolf introduces the book through the evocative power of the name:

For if you see a ship in full sail coming with the sun on it proudly seeping across the Mediterranean from the South Seas, one says at once, ‘Orlando��.

I could also write about the humour and the parody, which to me unfolded in a contagious crescendo. Or on the fluidity of boundaries, especially of gender and of time. Or on the self-deluding tasks of biographers and history when they think they are approaching truth. Or on Woolf’s view of history--liking the Greeks for their literature, the Elizabethan age for almost the same thing, the Restoration because it restored, the seventeenth for its explorations of the exotic, the eighteenth for its light and Pope, Swift, Addison and Dryden, and her strong dislike for Victoria and all that she entailed.

But no, I will leave the other themes for other reviewers. And the meditation of the name of Orlando for another Orlando book.

Instead I will dwell on something that struck out at me: The Dome.

For it figures prominently. How could it otherwise? A dome has to stand out, bowl out, bulge out, stick out. Sometimes in stone and mortar, sometimes in bone. The cupola first appears as Orlando’s forehead.

...he had eyes like drenched violets, so large that the water seemed to have brimmed in them and widened them; and a brow like the swelling of a marble dome pressed between the two medallions which were his temples.

And we cannot be too surprised by the bold imagery. The female fashion for plucking the foreheads was still well alive during Elizabethan times.





Then Sir Wren’s cupola appears when it was not there yet.

Here was the fretted cross at Charing, there the dome of St. Paul’s; there the massy square of the Tower buildings.

It was not there because during the reign of King James the old St. Pauls was still standing; the Great Fire of 1666 had not happened yet. And the cathedral looked like this.



What game is Woolf playing? She was a smart and educated Londoner, and must have known what she was doing. Later on, about a hundred years later, she takes us out of our perplexity, or sinks us more in it? Our protagonist, by then living in the late 17C, says:

That then was the dome of St. Paul’s which Mr. Wren had built during her absence.

Before that, Orlando had visited the Orient. In a novel with such a title, the fantastic and exotic geographies could not fail to emerge. The outstanding cupolas were those of Hagia Sophia:

At this hour the mist would lie so thick that the domes of Santa Sofia and the rest would seem to be afloat; gradually the mist would uncover them; the bubbles would be seen to be firmly fixed��

Marvelled by the fantastic domes, Orlando when she is back in London, has her eyes properly sharpened. And with her vision, we also see the significance of the Dome in Woolf's novel. It has an irresistible allure - and significance.

Among the hurry of these thoughts, however, here now rose, like a dome of smooth white marble, something which whether fact or fancy, was so impressive to her fevered imagination that she settled upon it as one has seen a swarm of vibrant dragonflies alight��

The cavity where the lyrical is born, the overwhelming cove under which the poet’s mind ferments.

The truth was that the image of the marble dome which her eyes had first discovered so faintly that it suggested a poet’s forehead and thus started a flock of irrelevant ideas, was no figment, but a reality; and as the ship advanced down the Thames before a favouring gale, the image with all its associations gave place to the truth, and revealed itself as nothing more and nothing less than the dome of a vast cathedral rising among a fretwork of white spires.

And when the sinister 19C looms, it irretrievably has to first threaten in the vicinity of the fully charged and spacious image. Those alarming clouds over St. Paul’s airy and solid dome.

Orlando then for the first time noticed a small cloud gathered behind the dome of St. Paul’s. As the strokes sounded, the cloud increased, and she saw it darken and spread with extraordinary speed�� With the twelfth stroke at midnight, the darkness was complete. A turbulent welter of cloud covered the city. All was darkness; all was doubt; all was confusion. The eighteenth century was over; the nineteenth century had begun.

This novel, like Wren’s cupola, is more than what you first see.

Or so I have imagined.