The reason why Orlando decides to flee England and asks King Charles to appoint him Ambassador Extraordinary to Constantinople is often overlooked. As the biographer recounts, upon seeing Harriet, Lust, the other side of Love, perches on Orlando's shoulders in a flurry of personal pronouns, black, hairy, and brutish (O 87). It is Lust that urges Orlando to undertake the perilous journey East, to the land that will enable his transformation. Who is, then, this most ignoble of reasons, Archduchess Harriet Griselda of Finsteraarhorn and Scand-op-Boom? She has “a face a yard long and staring eyes, dressed somewhat ridiculously too, in a mantle and riding cloak though the season was warm” (O 86). Upon seeing her, Orlando is “so suddenly and violently overcome by passion of some sort that he has to leave the room” (O 86). This passion, however, is very different from what Orlando felt when he encountered Sasha, the Russian princess. Both Harriet and Sasha dress in a manner that makes their gender ambiguous, yet there is an important, if subtle difference: unlike Sasha, Archduchess Harriet is a man in disguise. The “geomorphic imagination”— “the transformation of male bodies and masculinity fictions into their equivalent—but different—female counterparts” (O lx)—is not a characteristic of Archduke Harry who, unlike Shelmerdine and Orlando, seems to fail at transgender identification.

Archduke Harry, “who resembled nothing so much as a monstrous hare” (O 131), is based on Vita Sackville West's real-life early suitor, Henry Lascelles (1882–1947), sixth Earl of Harewood. In real life, just as in fiction, Lascelles did marry a “great lady” in 1922: Princess Mary, the only daughter of King George V and Queen Mary. In Woolf 's fiction, however, Archduke Harry of Finster-Aarhorn and Scand-op-Boom's lineage is rooted in “the Roumanian territory.” Why “Roumania”? The region must have appeared on Woolf 's field of vision much clearer than Archduke Harry on that of Orlando—“a shadow [that] crossed the tail of his eye.”

Explanatory footnotes to these pages of Orlando usually tell us that during this historical period (the reign of Charles II, 1660–1685) the “Roumanian territory” was part of the Ottoman Empire. It is perhaps the “exoticism” the Western gaze found in this region that may have been enticing—the East is, after all, the place where Orlando finds license to undergo his sexual transformation.