Woolf at the Scriblerus Club, or, Orlando Meets the Augustans

In Orlando (1928), Virginia Woolf defines a potential path towards the renewal of biography, a path that, while moving away from tradition, maintains a strong bond with eighteenth-century culture. The paper considers how Woolf’s engagement with this particular past articulates her modern point of view on life writing. I am most interested in those aspects of eighteenth-century culture that work subversively against the hierarchical and androcentric aspects of the Victorian biographical tradition. In particular, looking back at James Boswell’s The Life of Samuel Johnson (1791), Woolf seems to encourage a form of ‘copartnership’ between Orlando’s biographer and his/her elusive subject aimed at preserving human complexity and hybridity in biographical portrayals; moreover, the experimentalism of the Augustan female rake and Woolf’s awareness of some early attempts at female self-representation inform her understanding of the place of women, as biographers and as subjects, within the English biographical tradition.