The above sentence from Orlando serves as the starting point for some reflections on the dialectics of obscurity, fame and history in one of Virginia Woolf's most famous novels. While a concern with these concepts is recurrent in Woolf's oeuvre, the issue of fame lies at the heart of Orlando's pseudo-bio/historiographical narrative, intertwined with questions of gender and time, aesthetics and ethics. Typical of Woolf's poetics, the sentence is rich with tropes of antithesis, rhetorical repetition, personification of abstract notions, and analogies. It also epitomises much of her thinking about the historical conditions and goals of writing in their relation to subjectivity. In many ways, then, this sentence points to the possibility of reading Orlando as a comment on a genetics of writing, in its constitutional imbrication with a politics of the self in time.

As a mock-biography in the form of a novel, Orlando ironically points to biography's generic function of immortalising its subject. It foregrounds the fact that biographies give their subject a name and singular identity, and are thus inextricably bound with fame in at least two seemingly antithetical ways. On the one hand, biographies are consequent on fame, precisely because it is for already famous people that the writing of bios is typically reserved; and, on the other, a biography arguably confers fame on its subject by singling out a person's life as worthy of recording for posterity. It has become a commonplace to point out Woolf's understanding of the political significance of biography, and her subversion of the standard biographical bias for ‘great men’, great deeds and teleological narratives. In a 1927 letter, she described the conception of Orlando in terms of her desire to ‘revolutionise biography in one night’ (L3 429).