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A ‘slobbering valentine to a member of the upper classes’, ‘an orgy of snobbery’, and ‘the apotheosis of brown-nosing’: Angela Carter’s excoriating dismissal of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (1928), delivered in Tom Paulin’s notorious televisual polemic, J’accuse Virginia Woolf (1991), serves as a reminder that this work has as much potential as any of her novels to provoke heated disagreements. That it should be so might seem surprising, as it is one of the most easy-going of her novels, one in which she consciously simplified her prose style in the interests of drawing in the reader effortlessly; it is also the most comic of her novels, mocking the conventions of history and biography. That Carter in particular should be so violently opposed to the novel is particularly surprising, as its willingness to rewrite conventional fictional forms anticipates her novels, and its employment of fantastic elements anticipates the ‘magic realist’ mode that she was to employ. Like Orlando, Carter’s own The Passion of New Eve (1977) also centres on a change of sex, albeit more violently wrought. Mostly intriguingly of all, in 1979 Glyndebourne Opera House commissioned Carter to write a libretto for an opera, never completed, of Woolf’s novel. Carter’s dismissal of Woolf might appear to stem from unease about working in her shadow.

To leave it there would neglect the prominence of social class in Carter’s opinion. Though the fragments of her libretto were published under the title Orlando: or, The Enigma of the Sexes, another working title was Orlando: An English Country House Opera; the country house and the aristocracy are significant factors in Orlando. Woolf’s novel was inspired by her passionate relationship with Vita Sackville-West in 1925 and 1926. Vita had been brought up at Knole in Kent, her family’s ancestral seat since the early seventeenth century; she loved the house and its history, but as a woman, she did not stand to inherit it. Vita’s family history made a strong impression on Woolf: ‘All these ancestors & centuries, & silver & gold, have bred a perfect body’, she wrote in 1924, with a hint of critical awareness of Vita’s privilege; in the same diary entry she noted how Knole could house all the poor of Judd Street, then one of the slum areas of Bloomsbury. In 1927 she was more overawed, more deeply in love, and less critical: walking round Knole with Vita, ‘All the centuries seemed lit up, the past expressive, articulate; not dumb & forgotten; but a crowd of people stood behind, not dead at all; not remarkable; fair faced, long limbed; affable; & so we reach the days of Elizabeth quite easily.’ Politically Woolf was liberal, progressive, and above all anti-authoritarian; by the 1930s she was actively involved in her local Labour Party. Visiting Knole in 1927, however, she seems to have been enchanted by a conservative ideology in which the country house serves as symbol of continuity between generations, of the centrality of monarchy to the British constitution, and of a benign relation between the aristocracy and the people. It is ‘ideological’ in the sense of masking and normalizing exploitative economic relations.

The strength of Carter’s hostility in 1991 may well have something to do with the revival of the country house ideology in British mass culture in the 1980s. ITV’s adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, in the depths of the economic recession of the early 1980s, was a particularly pointed example. Critical works such as Patrick Wright’s On Living in an Old Country (1985) and Robert Hewison’s The Heritage Industry (1987) highlighted the ways in which ‘heritage’ serves political ends. However, Carter’s remarks don’t tell the whole truth, no matter how much they resonated in their moment. Important though the country house is to Orlando, it is less important than poetry and the hero/heroine’s dogged pursuit of the muse, and poetry in turn is less important than the question of personal identity. House-building and poetry-writing stand in direct contrast to each other. In Chapter II, it is the scorn of the poet Nick Greene that makes Orlando turn to the refurbishment of his house; though when the work is complete he holds banquets there, when the banquets are at their height he retreats to his private room to enjoy the pleasures of poetry. When Orlando travels to Turkey, his/her English values are put into perspective. To the Turkish gipsies, a family lineage four or five hundred years is of negligible duration, and the desire to own a house with hundreds of bedrooms is vulgar. Viewed from a certain angle, the established aristocrat becomes a vulgar upstart. Although the house still matters to Orlando when she returns to it triumphantly in the final chapter, and although the house still holds vivid memories of the people she has known, the cause of the triumph is the recognition of Orlando’s writing; and she recalls the sceptical perspective of the gipsies.

Focusing on the relationship between Vita and Virginia, Vita’s son Nigel Nicolson described Orlando as ‘the longest and most charming love-letter in literature’, a phrase that was Carter’s starting point. If Carter’s estimate is distorted by the demands of her time, Nicolson’s isn’t quite right either: Orlando is more than a purely personal document. It raises questions about personal identity and national identity, about history and its transmission, and about the value of writing, and it does so in a way that persistently mocks established values.

Headline image: Knole House, owned by the National Trust (2009). In the early 17th century the Sackville family re-modelled the old archbishops’ palace into a stately home. Photo by John Wilder. CC-BY-SA-3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

The post Virginia Woolf’s Orlando and the country house appeared first on OUPblog.

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Have you watched Adventure Time? Maybe you have seen the comic or the graphic novel or some of the merchandise. It's a phenomenon, not least because of the age range it seems to appeal to. It is a show on the Cartoon Network, which the network claims tops its ratings and is watched by 2 million 2–11 year old boys – but I know many older kids, including students, who watch it avidly too.



When I first saw it I must admit I was surprised that something as violent, surreal and bizarre – and sometimes with such horrific and sexual content – was being aired for young children. It has a PG rating but that does nothing to keep it from young children's impressionable brains.

Here's a list of extreme stuff you can find in it. It includes: "Lots of references to sex, ejaculation, viagra, sex-positions, sexual remarks and humor." And here's a spoof web page parodying the reaction of the Christian right.

Disney it is not.

I think it's brilliant (but then I have a degree in Dada and Surrealism), and its freshness is perhaps partly because it's not written in the conventional sense (by a writer or writer team) but produced by artists using storyboards that are then developed by a team, even going so far as deliberately to employ surrealist techniques such as the Exquisite Corpse game in order to come up with ideas. It's also hand-drawn, each 11 minute episode taking 8–9 months to make.

Now: "Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?" This was the line that introduced the American radio show The Shadow in the 1930s (it later became a film, comic book series, etc etc). One answer is (besides the eponymous detective) – that children do. Children are far more preoccupied with questions about what adults call the dark side of human nature than many adults give them credit for. The best children's writers know this.

Adventure Time is therefore in the same ballpark as Where the Wild Things Are...


 ... the kind that were explored by Angela Carter in her novels about growing up such as the Magic Toyshop and the Company of Wolves...


...stories where grandmothers turning to carnivorous beasts, the bedroom is populated by monsters, and the house next door contains versions of your own parents but with buttons for eyes (thanks, Neil)...



But it's also in the same ballpark as beautiful wonder-filled Hayao Miyazaki films such as My Neighbour Totoro. 



There is a genuine sense of beauty, spirituality and awe in many of Adventure Time's episodes or scenes, that is also shared by children who are viewing the world for the first time. It's as if the creators have been able to access their own infantile selves to identify with the way that children see the world. 


My reference to The Shadow was chosen for another reason: the parts of the personality satisfied in its fans by Adventure Time and these other stories can be seen as parts of the 'shadow self', as described by the poet Robert Bly in his A Little Book on the Human Shadow.

The Jungian theory of the human shadow, itself part-derived from myths and old stories, is that babies and young children have what Bly calls a 360° personality. But much of this compass of human potential is socialised out of their behaviour during their upbringing. By the time they are around 20 years old just a slice remains. This is the socialised personality that becomes fixed as an adult.

The remaining portion is buried – the shadow – but it emerges in odd ways: our obsessions, the imaginary traits we project onto situations and other people, particularly our partners, the things we are frightened of, particularly in ourselves.

Bly says that after the age of 40 or so – the age of the midlife crisis – adults often start to unpack their shadow. Their reaction to this process determines the rest of the course of their lives. 

The shadow is not bad, nor evil. Those are labels that adults put onto things. The shadow contains just what was suppressed, punished or ignored during the socialisation or upbringing process, and depends on the values held by the parents and the culture they belong too. 

And this, I think, is why Adventure Time appeals to young adults as well as children. Young adults are struggling with those aspects of themselves which adults want to repress. In young adults there is a sense of nostalgia for their childhood self, that remains as a fading echo before the responsibilities of adulthood unkindly snuff it out altogether and they forget forever what being a child is like. They know this is going to happen, they regret it and they try to cling on to its last vestiges as long as possible.

The shadow is important, vital, necessary, and it is dangerous to repress it or ignore it. The makers of Adventure Time, and the Cartoon Network that commissions it, cannot be unaware of this. It is a liminal gate to the subconscious, the place where creativity thrives.


If I seem to be making rather grand claims for what is after all a children's cartoon I make no apologies. We all, as writers, are gatekeepers to this realm, aren't we? And each of us, in our own unique way, delves beyond the gate to do our work.

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Seeing I was reminded of it yesterday, here is the introduction to Mark Chadbourn's Award-winning novella The Fairy Feller's Master Stroke. ( And for the curious, And here's a link to the publisher's website. The book's sold out in paperback, but it looks like they have a few copies left in hardback.)

Reason tells me that I would have first encountered the painting itself, the enigmatically titled Fairy Feller’s Master Stroke, reproduced, pretty much full-sized, in the fold-out cover of a QUEEN album, at the age of fourteen or thereabouts, and it made no impression upon me at all. That’s one of the odd things about it. You have to see it in the flesh, paint on canvas, the real thing, which hangs, mostly, when it isn’t travelling, in the Pre-Raphaelite room of the Tate Gallery, out of place among the grand gold-framed Pre-Raphaelite beauties, all of them so much more huge and artful than the humble fairy court walking through the daisies, for it to become real. And when you see it several things will become apparent; some immediately, some eventually.

When I was in my early twenties I received a copy of a book to review, of photographs taken by a Victorian doctor named Diamond, of the inmates of Bedlam. Hopeless bedraggled lunatics who wring their hands as they squint at the camera, posing awkwardly for the period of time it took for the photographs to be exposed; their faces are frozen, although their hands often blur into things like the wings of doves. Portraits in madness and pain, and in only one of the photographs was a man, a lunatic like the others, actually doing something.

The madman in the photograph has a beard. He has an easel in front of him, on which he is executing an oval painting of remarkable intricacy. He stares craftily at the camera, and there is a small, fierce smile on his face. His eyes glitter. He looks squat and proud, and when, a year later, I saw for the first time in the flesh, his masterpiece, The Fairy Feller’s Master Stroke, the first thing I realised was that the white-bearded sorrowful dwarf who dominates the centre of the painting, staring out at the watcher, is Richard Dadd grown old.

The people in the Tate Gallery who visit the Pre-Raphaelite rooms are there for their own reasons, and are responding to something distant and melodic. The Waterhouses and the Millaises and the Burne Joneses exert their own magic: spectators wander past the paintings, their lives enriched and made special. The Dadd, on the other hand, is a snare, and those people with a place in their soul for it are hooked. They can stand in front of that painting for, literally, hours, lost in it, puzzling over these fairies and goblins and men and women, trying to understand their size, their shape, their eccentricities (“Every time you looked you saw something new, “ as Mark Chadbourn’s narrator, Danny, unreliable on so many points, but reliable here and on this, informs us).

Dadd knew who they were, the people in the painting. He knew their lives. He knew what they were. You know that when you see them.

If you’ve ever seen the painting reproduced, if you’re on a journey specifically to see it, then the next thing that will surprise you is the size. It’s smaller than you imagined – smaller than seems possible. There is so much to fit in, after all. The authorised Tate Gallery reproduction of The Fairy Feller’s Master Stroke I bought after seeing it the first time was almost twice the size of the picture itself.

And the painting is not the reproduction. The thing itself, in its frame, has a magic – in the colour, in the detail -- that no photograph, no poster, no postcard, ever seems to begin to capture.

So, like Danny and his mother, you look at the painting, seeing every brush stroke.

And you can look at it for hours before you notice something else about the painting, something so big and strange and obvious you can’t understand why you didn’t see it at once, or why no-one else has commented upon it.

It’s not finished.

Much of the bottom of the painting, where the colour choices seem odd and washed out, are only outlined on the light brown of the undercoat of canvas. The fawn-coloured grass that pushes the eye up to the Feller himself is fawn because Dadd – who took many years to paint it – ran out of time. He gave it away before it was done.

And there’s one final thing you will know, without question, if you’ve seen that painting in the flesh, and it’s this: he knew what he was painting. He had seen it, through those crafty eyes. He had gone on the great journey, the grandest of grand tours, and this was what he was bringing back.

There was a sense that one of the great secrets of the universe would be revealed if one could only examine it long enough to divine the clues, says Danny, says Mark, and they’re right, of course.

Before his madness, before the murder of his father, before the ill-fated journey to France (he was arrested on a train, when he attacked a fellow passenger, on his way to Paris to kill the Emperor) Dadd’s paintings are quite pretty, and perfectly ordinary: forgettable chocolate box cover concoctions of fairy scenes from Shakespeare. Nothing special or magical about them. Nothing that would make them last. Nothing true.

And then he went mad. Not just a little bit mad, but quite spectacularly mad; a murderous patricidal madness of demons and Egyptian gods. He spent the rest of his life locked up – first in Bedlam, later one of the first prisoners in Broadmoor – and, after a while, he began to paint, trading his paintings for favours. Gone were the chocolate box fairies. Now there was an intensity to his paintings and drawings of fairy courts, of bible scenes, of his fellow inmates (real or imaginary), that makes those we have such treasures. They were worked on with an intensity and single-mindedness that is, quite simply, scary.

He spent the rest of his life behind bars, locked up with the dangerously insane, as dangerously insane as any of them, but with a message for us from, as it were, the other side. Apart from this, his life was wasted.

Still, he left us paintings, and riddles, and one unfinished painting (donated to the Tate by, if memory serves, Siegfried Sassoon) which continues to obsess. Angela Carter wrote an astonishing radio play, Come Unto These Yellow Sands, about the painting, Dadd’s life, Victorian art. I wrote a film treatment once in which the painting was a key, and came close once to organising an anthology in which each story would be about one of the witnesses to the Fairy Feller’s chestnut-smashing blow. And now Mark Chadbourn gives us a novella, in which the painting is a clue (perhaps), a murder-weapon (possibly), and above all, and unquestionably, a key: a key to a life, to a family, to mysteries, to solutions, to madness and to, above all, reality.

It’s a story of a life wasted, of love and of pain, and of a place in which Dadd’s painting and Dadd’s life become both a template and an excuse: a reason for living, and a reason for dying, and it is not until the very end that we understand what we have read.

Does Mark Chadbourn’s story provide an answer to the riddle of the Fairy Feller, and his master stroke? Danny’s mother certainly seems to think so, but Danny himself comes to realise that any answer is only a resting point upon the way. That the mystery, like the painting, like our understanding of the painter, will always remain unfinished. And that may be the greatest master stroke of all...


Neil Gaiman
April 6, 2002

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