Introduction: Sentencing Orlando

Summary

A book is not made of sentences laid end to end, but of sentences built, if an image helps, into arcades or domes.

Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own

If the line is the privileged semantic unit in verse, we could ask whether the sentence plays the same role in prose. Virginia Woolf raises this possibility in A Room of One's Own (1929), where the sentence is foregrounded as an aesthetically as well as historically and politically charged entity. The metaphor in the epigraph above figures the sentence as the very material by which the novel can become an art form in its own right, drawing inspiration from the formal qualities of architecture and the visual arts. The prose sentence emerges in this text as an exclusionary property to be handed down through a lineage of male writers, but is appropriated by the woman writer as a ‘tool’ and ‘weapon’ with which to transform the novel genre. In Woolf's emphasis on the shape of the book, built from sentences, aesthetic expression converges with a subversive gender and genre politics, and her engagement with the sentence as a material element in the writer's arsenal-toolbox comprises the shape-shifting of literary forms and canons across history.

The metaphors of shape, form and re-forming that pervade A Room of One's Own recur throughout Woolf's critical essays, where they inform an aesthetic theory of the sentence in which the idea of morphology is central. Morphology as a concept has roots in scientific investigations of structures and shapes from the fields of biology to linguistics, in which it can also double as ‘a history of variation in form’. Woolf was consistently concerned with the morphological variations of literature and the literary sentence. Her fiction engages her critical ideas around literary history and form, and she often described her novels in terms of their architecture. Woolf's sense of morphology is particularly vivid in her dazzling novel-biography Orlando: A Biography (1928), a text whose fantastic time-span and multiple, shifting styles set it apart in her oeuvre. When Woolf articulated her theory of the literary sentence in A Room of One's Own, she had already put it into play in Orlando, where fantasy, parody and satire combine to produce a wide spectrum of different sentence types.