What I have just cited is hardly the most memorable or resonant of Orlando's sentences. It does not draw attention to itself through thickness of style – the joys of ventriloquism, parody and pastiche that energise this writer's holiday. If Woolf is citing anyone in this sentence it is herself: the lightness of touch that defines her essays. And yet, like every phrase of Orlando, it has its work cut out, not so much in moving the narrative forward as in carrying and indexing, freighting, nudging and winking, a signifying practice that by necessity breaks the limits of the sentence and sets it in connection with a wide field of signification. As such the sentence exemplifies the fundamentally allusive nature of Woolf's writing, where even the most fleeting reference has complex resonances, inviting a work of reading that never finishes.

The question that will occupy me in this chapter is where we are invited to look, and what the allusion nudges us to see, a question complicated by another typical feature of Woolf's textual practice: the unequal juxtaposition. I’m thinking of the Woolfian constellation that transposes and reframes by establishing links between the radically disparate, like those fortuitous ‘swift marriages’ Woolf speaks of in ‘Craftsmanship’ (1937; E6 91–102) – the promiscuous mating of words brought about by their free-floating traffic along lines of contiguity and association. Orlando's marriage of Bishop and negress is one such constellation of the ‘freakish and unequal’, an oxymoronic mating of chains of signification which, I want to suggest, nudges us in the direction of Woolf's first novel, The Voyage Out (1915), and its story of the formation of the woman artist in its initial, painstakingly serious form.