Orlando as Lady Mary Wortley Montagu

In Virginia Woolf’s literary history, the eighteenth century saw the male writer and poetry begin to cede power and popularity to the female writer and the novel. In Orlando (1928), Woolf personifies this literary history with the title character, a nobleman-poet who turns from man to woman in the eighteenth century, while his/her poetry turns from tolerable to bathetic. The eighteenth-century Orlando reflects the life and writing of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689-1762), a fervent defender of novel-reading and a lively writer of letters. Lady Montagu specifically shadows Orlando’s adventures in Constantinople and falling-out with Pope.