Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, Coleridge, and Jane Ellen Harrison

In Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (1928) one of the markers of cultural difference between the protagonist and the gypsies she meets in Turkey is linguistic: they have no word for ‘beautiful’, and when Orlando wishes to remark the beauty of a sunset, she has to point and to say, in their language, ‘good to eat’.1 In a recent edition of the novel, I suggested that Woolf’s source for the idea may have been Samuel Taylor Coleridge.2 In the second of his ‘Essays on the Principles of Genial Criticism’ (1814), Coleridge reports ‘a very intelligent traveller’, describing the inhabitants of Dahoma, Africa, and saying that ‘in their whole language they have no word for Beauty or the beautiful; but say either it is very nice, or it is good’.3 The essay had been reprinted in Joseph Cottle’s Early Recollections, Chiefly Relating to the Late Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1837), Leslie Stephen’s copy of which was among Virginia Woolf’s books.4