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This chapter focuses on the British modernist whose work represents the most sustained fictionalising engagement with biography. It recounts changes in biographical theory in Woolf's lifetime; especially her father's Dictionary of National Biography; the influence of Freud on Bloomsbury; Woolf's own critical discussions of biography; and New Criticism's antagonism to biographical interpretation; though it also draws on recent biographical criticism of Woolf. It discusses Jacob's Room and Flush, but concentrates on Orlando, arguing that it draws on the notions of imaginary and composite portraits discussed earlier. Whereas Orlando is often read as a ‘debunking’ of an obtuse biographer‐narrator, it shows how Woolf's aims are much more complex. First, the book's historical range is alert to the historical development of biography; and that the narrator is no more fixed than Orlando, but transforms with each epoch. Second, towards the ending the narrator begins to sound curiously like Lytton Strachey, himself the arch‐debunker of Victorian biographical piety. Thus Orlando is read as both example and parody of what Woolf called ‘The New Biography’. The chapter reads Woolf in parallel with Harold Nicolson's The Development of English Biography, and also his book Some People—a text whose imaginary (self)portraiture provoked her discussion of ‘The New Biography’ as well as contributing to the conception of Orlando.

This chapter assesses the growth of Penelope Fitzgerald’s literary reputation since her death in 2000, and gauges the nature of her influence on other writers. It weighs up contemporary criticism of her work, and suggests that despite the favourable attention given to her life and writing in recent years, including film and radio adaptations of her novels, and Hermione Lee’s full-length biography, Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life, Fitzgerald’s place in the canon of twentieth-century British fiction is not necessarily secure. This is partly because of the difficulty of categorizing Fitzgerald’s work. Her style and sensibility have more in common with her chronological peers, such as post-war novelists Barbara Pym, Muriel Spark and Iris Murdoch, than with novelists of the 1980s and 1990s. At the same time, reviewers of female ironists such as Fitzgerald tend to overplay the benignity of her fiction, as though subtlety and understatement were incommensurate with the exploration of the major questions of life. The chapter concludes by calling on educators, writers, and publishers to support her legacy by continuing to study, adapt and print her works.