The article analyses Virginia Woolf’s novel Orlando (1928) as a form of biographical novel innovative for the first third of the twentieth century. “Phantasmagoric” biography, which syncretically combines the features of the prototype for Orlando (W. Sackville-West) and fictional androgynous heroes, is considered in connection with the idea of ‘The new biography’ from Virginia Woolf’s essays and her experiments with the genre of biography (Flash, etc.). Continuing the Sterne’s tradition of biographical narrative deconstruction, the writer develops the concept of an ambivalent “fluid” personality, whose story does not fit into the linear model of chronicle. Woolf’s genre experiment anticipates the postmodernist play with biographical mimesis.
Virginia Woolf; Orlando; Laurence Sterne; the new biography; biofiction; English modernist literature.