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When Virginia Woolf introduced the idea of Orlando (1928) to Vita SackvilleWest, whose life was the basis for Orlando, she explained that Sackville-West's "excellence as a subject" arose largely from her "noble birth," adding teasingly: "(But whats [sic\ 400 years of nobility, all the same?)" (L3 429). Even before she contemplated Orlando, Woolf wrote of Sackville-West in her diary : " Snob as I am, I trace her passions 500 years back, & they become romantic to me, like old yellow wine" (1)2 235-36). From the outset, Woolf thus tied her interest in Sackville-West to her own snobbishness. This was a character trait that had great interest for Woolf, who made it a theme for introspection in one of the papers she read to the Bloomsbury Memoir Club in 1936. In this paper, entitled "Am I a Snob?," she juxtaposes her desire to engage with members of the upper class with her indifference toward meeting writers, intellectuals, and scientists-she would rather meet the Prince of Wales than Einstein-and concludes that she is "a coronet snob," confessing: "I want coronets; but they must be old coronets; coronets that carry land with them and country houses; coronets that breed simplicity, eccentricity, ease" (186). Although there are no coronets on display in the portraits that illustrate Orlando, the photographs of Sackville-West, a famous aristocrat at the time, and the historical paintings of her aristocratic ancestors portray the coronet-wearing segment of society in a visually convincing and enticing manner. The historical paintings, used to illustrate Orlando as a man, and the photographs, used to illustrate Orlando as a woman (the portraits show Orlando first as a boy in the Elizabethan age and lastly as a thirty-six-year-old woman in 1928) thus accord with Woolf's craving for "coronets." However, the illustrations express more than Woolf's "attraction to aristocracy, to Englishness, to wealth," which Suzanne Raitt identifies as part of Woolf's attraction to Sackville-West as a lover (Raitt 160). The illustrations also articulate the ambivalence to these "social privileges" that Woolf, according to Raitt, later demonstrated in Three Guineas (1938). The illustrations thus anticipate Woolf's most political works, beginning with. I Room of One 's Own (1929), and they involve Sackville-West directly in a critical exposition of the aristocracy.
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