The Queen had come.

These four words surely comprise the most direct sentence of Orlando: A Biography, the novel that taught Woolf ‘how to write a direct sentence’ (D3 203). Vulgar, bawdy, openly celebrating female autoeroticism, orgasmic pleasure, they nevertheless remain coded, cryptic, somehow hidden in plain sight. These plainest of words simply report, in base language of information, the historic arrival of Queen Elizabeth I at Knole in 1573 – if indeed the fictitious Orlando's ‘own great house’ (O 21) is the house that would not be inherited, because of male primogeniture, by the novel's real-life dedicatee, Vita Sackville-West. VSW's book Knole and the Sackvilles (1922) does not mention that visit, but clearly states that Knole was ‘granted to Thomas Sackville by Queen Elizabeth’ thirteen years later in 1586. In context and out, this sentence refuses to oblige any such innocent or literal reading. It is equally a direct, open report of a woman's having achieved orgasm: ‘The Queen had come’. With orgasm comes sovereign power too: ‘The Queen had come’. The pluperfect is the coup de grace: it was and still is no use arguing or worrying after the fact. An orgasmic feminist Sapphic coup had (has) already happened, so let us face the fact: ‘The Queen had come’.

‘To come’ for centuries has meant to ‘experience sexual orgasm’, its earliest recorded usage in a song, ‘Walking in Meadow Green’ (1650): ‘Then off he came, & blusht for shame soe soone that he had endit’. See too the notorious Earl of Rochester's pornographic collection Cabinet of Love (1714): ‘Just as we came, I cried, “I faint! I die!”’. An instance of female erotic urgency occurs in the anonymous Victorian memoir My Secret Life (c. 1890): ‘“Shove on”, said she, “I was just coming”’. Woolf would have read in Joyce's Ulysses (1922) two further lewd examples of coming: ‘Suppose you … came too quick with your best girl’; ‘yet I never came properly till I was what 22’. In 1928, the year of Orlando's publication, D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928), immediately banned for obscenity, furnished two more examples: ‘“We came off together that time”, he said’; ‘when I’d come and really finished, then she’d start on her own account’.