This sentence inaugurates the frantic acceleration into modernity that is the final section of the final chapter of Orlando: the section that brings us to ‘the eleventh of October […] 1928 […] the present moment’ (O 206). It is because we conclude with this extended narrative of a single day that, according to James Hafley (in one of the earliest monographs on Woolf's work), 11th October 1928 can be seen as nothing less than the day of Orlando: ‘in a sense, Orlando occupies only the one day in 1928, and from it are projected back into space the three hundred years of its first five chapters’. Hafley's explicitly Bergsonian reading, emphasising the perpetual presence of the past, disrupts the conventional characterisation of the novel as a capacious, sweeping, and specifically historical epic by drawing our attention to the importance, even primacy, of its final day.

Orlando has, of course, a complex relationship with the very notion of history. On the one hand, it is a deeply historical text, reaching back centuries into the past and including numerous historical personae. Many of its earliest reviewers explicitly praised it as a new history of England, and specifically of English literature (albeit an unconventional one). In characteristically Woolfian style, there are aspects of the novel which celebrate conventional historical narratives even while the text as a whole parodies the historical panorama it surveys. On the other hand, arguably its most important aim is rewriting history: not just producing a new version of it, but fundamentally challenging the discourses and paradigms through which history is constructed. As Angeliki Spiropoulou puts it in her work on Woolf's engagement with the concept of history, in this novel ‘Woolf extends her critique of traditional notions of subjectivity through biography […] not so much in order to write history as to upset the terms and assumptions of history writing concerning method and truth’.