RISINGTIDEFALLINGSTAR. Philip Hoare

acted a part; nobody shrieked.’ The last man looked at the moon and the waves and, ‘with a dry snorting sound’, he too was sucked below, ‘& the aeroplane rocked & rolled – miles from anywhere, off Newfoundland, while I slept in Rodmell’. Ten years later Virginia drove past a crashed aeroplane near Gatwick and learned afterwards that three men on board had died. ‘But we went on, reminding me of that epitaph in Greek anthology: when I sank, the other ships sailed on.’

      The sea echoes over and over again in Woolf’s work, with the rhythm of moon-dragged tides. Having finished To the Lighthouse, she entered a dark period, exhausted, fighting for breath; yet out of it she sensed the same vision of presence beyond being that she had seen in Brontë and Melville; something ‘frightening & excited in the midst of my profound gloom, depression, boredom, whatever it is: One sees a fin passing far out.’ It was a deep, cryptic image, hard to diagnose or discern, as she confessed to her diary a year later, summoning ‘my vision of a fin rising on a wide blank sea. No biographer could possibly guess this important fact about my life in the late summer of 1926: yet biographers pretend they know people.’

      As a boy on holiday in Dorset, I saw a distant glimpse of dolphins, arcing through the water off Durleston Head, a rocky promontory held out in the grey English Channel. As a girl holidaying in Cornwall, Woolf had seen cetaceans too: one family sailing trip in the summer of 1892 ‘ended hapily [sic] by seeing the sea pig or porpoise’; her nickname for her sister Vanessa, with whom she was extraordinarily close, was Dolphin. And in The Waves, the book that followed To the Lighthouse, and which became her most elegiac, internalised work, her vision returned as one character watches a fin turn, ‘as one might see the fin of a porpoise on the horizon’.

      The sickle-sharp shape seen against the featureless sea – something there and not there – is the emblem of knowing and unknowingness. It is not the real dolphin leaping through the waves, or the curly-tailed, boy-bearing classical beast, or the mortal animal sacrificed and stranded on the sand, but something subtly different: the visible symbol of what lies below, swimming through the writer’s mind as a representation of her own otherness. In Woolf’s play Freshwater, a satire on the bohemian lives of Julia Margaret Cameron and Tennyson on the Isle of Wight, a porpoise appears off the Needles and swallows one of the characters’ engagement ring; in The Years, ‘slow porpoises’ appear ‘in a sea of oil’; and in a vivid episode in Orlando, a porpoise is seen embedded in the frozen Thames alongside shoals of eels and an entire boat and its cargo of apples resting on the river bed with an old woman fruit-seller on its deck as if still alive, ‘though a certain blueness hinted the truth’.

      Woolf made a sensual connection between the porpoise and her lover. Vita Sackville-West, tall and man-womanish – a kind of Elizabethan buccaneer clad in her brown velvet coat and breeches and strings of pearls and wreathed in the ancestral glamour of her vast house, Knole, where the stags greeted her at the door and even wandered into the great hall – morphed from she-pirate into a gambolling cetacean for Virginia. It was a dramatic appropriation, dragging the strange into the familiar. Perhaps it was no coincidence that Shakespeare – for whom gender and species were fluid states – often linked whales, living or stranded, with royal princes; or that Woolf’s name evoked both the queen and her colony.

      At Christmas 1925 the two women, who’d just spent their first night together, went shopping in Sevenoaks, where they saw a porpoise lit up on a fishmonger’s slab. Virginia elided that scene with her elusive paramour out of the sixteenth century into the twentieth, Vita standing there in her pink jersey and pearls, next to the marine mammal, both curiosities. ‘I like her & being with her, & the splendour,’ Woolf admitted to her diary like a schoolgirl, ‘she shines … with a candlelit radiance, stalking on legs like beech trees, pink glowing, grape clustered, pearl hung … so much in full sail on the high tides, where I am coasting down backwaters.’ ‘Aint it odd how the vision at the Sevenoaks fishmongers has worked itself into my idea of you?’ she wrote to Vita two years later, and proceeded to replay the image at the end of Orlando, when her gender- and time-defying hero/ine returns home in 1928 – ‘A porpoise in a fishmonger’s shop attracted far more attention.’ Meanwhile Vita made her own boast, of ‘having caught such a big silver fish’ in Virginia.

      Orlando is an updated fairy tale which collapses four centuries of English history into a whimsical modernist fantasy. History rushes by, briefly arrested in close-up, acid-trip details: the grains of the earth, the swelling river, the long still corridor in Orlando’s sprawling palace which runs as a conduit into time, as if a production of The Tempest were being acted out silently at the end of its wood-panelled tunnel. Orlando is both player and prince, like Elizabeth, or Shakespeare’s Fair Youth, Harry Southampton, animal and human, a chimera out of a Jacobean frieze, ‘stark naked, brown as a satyr and very beautiful’, as Virginia saw Vita. As the deer walked into Knole’s great hall, so Orlando moves through species, sex and time; she too might become a porpoise strung with baroque pearls, animating the unknown sea.