‘Orlando smashed up literary categories. Woolf called it a biography – in fact it is a novel. This was a direct hit at her dead father, Sir Leslie Stephen, the Victorian patriarch who had been the editor of the Dictionary of National Biography, a dead white male heterosexual enterprise. Women hardly existed in the DNB. Woolf’s father was one of the senior figures wiping out women from history. And claiming truth. Now Woolf struck back. She started the postmodernist fashion for mixing up fact and fiction, history and invention. We’re used to it now. She’s our pioneer.’
