Orlando and the Tudor Voyages

At the beginning of the fulsome and occasionally fantastical acknowledgements that form the preface to Orlando, Woolf pays tribute to a number of writers who ‘are dead and so illustrious that I scarcely dare name them’; ‘no one’, she goes on to say, ‘can read or write without being perpetually in the debt of Defoe, Sir Thomas Browne, Sterne, Sir Walter Scott, Lord Macaulay, Emily Brontë, De Quincey, and Walter Pater,—to name the first that come to mind’ (O 5). Woolf’s debt to the writers she mentions has long been established and commented upon. Other names spring to mind that may be added to this list. In terms of Orlando in particular, there is one glaring omission from Woolf’s gallery of illustrious forebears: Richard Hakluyt, preacher, colonial administrator, scholar, occasional spy and editor of The Principal Navigations Voyages Trafiques & Discoveries of the English Nation (published in 1589, with a considerably expanded three-volume second edition following in the years 1598–1600). Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations is a source book of letters, contracts, eye-witness accounts and reports that bear vivid and eloquent testimony to the early days of English enterprise and maritime exploration — it is also instrumental in setting the tone, choosing the scenery and selecting the key players for Woolf’s tongue-in-cheek romp through English literary history

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• The Romanticization of Cape Horn in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando

  Yeonsik Jung•ANQ A Quarterly Journal of Short…•2025

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