Orlando by Virginia Woolf

acres become five (
Knole,
pp. 1, 18).
    9.
a place crowned by a single oak tree
: Vita often wrote under an oak in Knole park, on a high mound known as the Mast Head (Nicolson). The oak tree, traditionally associated with English kings, later provides the title for Orlando’s major poem, his equivalent of Vita’s prize-winning poem
The Land.
Its title suggests the value of roots, family and Englishness.
    10.
Sometimes one could see the English Channel… London… Snowdon
: none of these places can actually be seen from Knole, but this panoramic sweep (echoed in the novel’s time scheme) seems to have been part of her plan for the book from its first conception: ‘Suddenly between twelve & one I conceived a whole fantasy to be called “The Jessamy Brides”… Two women, poor, solitary at the top of a house — one can see anything (for this is all fantasy) the Tower Bridge, clouds, aeroplanes… The Ladies are to have Con stantinople in view. Dreams of golden domes…’ (
Diary,
III, 14 March 1927, p. 131).
    11.
Mrs. Stewkley’s sitting-room… hodden brown
: a ‘Mrs Stewkly’ is named as ‘At the parlour table’ in a list of Knole household servants from 1613 (
Knole,
p. 78); hodden is a coarse woollen cloth; the unidentified writer is William Shakespeare, whose portrait was in the Poets’ Parlour at Knole. Vita later wrote, ‘I often entertained wild dreams that some light might be thrown on the Shakespeare problem by a discovery of letters or documents at Knole’ (
Knole,
4th edn, 1958, p. 57).
    Woolf had associated Shakespeare at work with the mystery of creativity in her short story ‘The Mark on the Wall’: ‘A man who sat himself solidly in an arm-chair, and looked into the fire, so – A shower of ideas fell perpetually from some very high Heaven down through his mind. He leant his forehead on his hand, and people, looking in through the open door…’ (
Shorter Fiction,
p. 85.)
    12.
the great Queen herself
: Queen Elizabeth gave Knole to Thomas Sackville in 1566, and visited the house on a royal progress in 1573. There was a portrait of her in the Brown Gallery (
Phillips,
I, p. 190; II, p. 423). Woolf’s portrayal of Queen Elizabeth was partly in spired by her waxwork effigy, then at Westminster Abbey, of which she wrote a description soon after completing
Orlando
: ‘Hereyes are wide and vigilant; her nose thin as the beak of a hawk; her lips shut tight; her eyebrows arched; only the jowl gives the finedrawn face its massiveness’ (
New Republic,
11 April 1928; reprinted in ‘The Fleeting Portrait’,
CE,
IV, p. 205). Woolf’s friend Lytton Strachey drew a comparable portrait of the ageing queen in his
Elizabeth and Essex
(published December 1928), but Woolf did not apparently read it until after the publication of
Orlando
in October (see
Diary,
III, 25 November 1928, p. 208).
    13.
she heard the guns in the Channel
: Vita had told Virginia of hearing the guns in France from Knole during the First World War (Nicolson). Woolf had herself heard them on the downs at Asheham in 1916 (see ‘Heard on the Downs’,
Essays,
II, pp. 40–42).
    14.
the great monastic house
: Knole had passed from Archbishop Bourchier and Cardinal Morton to Henry VIII, and thence to Queen Elizabeth who gave it to Thomas Sackville. Although the unnamed house in
Orlando
is said to have been given to Orlando’s father, Orlando himself is also identified with Thomas Sackville, both as a poet and playwright (Sackville had written
Gorboduc
and the moralistic poem
A Mirror for Magistrates),
as the Queen’s ‘young cousin’, and in receiving various honours from her. Like Sackville, Orlando be comes Lord Treasurer and Lord High Steward, is dubbed Knight of the Garter (see p. 18), and is sent to Scotland ‘on a sad embassy to the unhappy Queen’ (p. 18), i.e. to warn Mary Queen of Scots of her impending execution (
Knole,
pp. 34–5).
    15.
booming at the Tower
: i.e. at the Tower of London, to celebrate the defeat