How many yellow-slashed dawns have I seen and yet never thought of them in these terms.
The man, by the way, becomes her husband, after rescuing her from her prostrate state. When asked if she was injured, she responded memorably, ‘I am dead, sir’. This is less daft than it sounds. She had been declared dead in one or another legal case, and in others she had been declared a woman which, as the lawyers were quick to point out, amounted to the same thing.
‘Towering dark against the yellow-slashed sky of dawn, with the plovers rising and falling about him, she saw a man on horseback. He started. The horse stopped.’
Source: Virginia Woolf, Orlando: A Biography, ed. with an introduction by Rachel Bowlby (Oxford: World’s Classics, 1992), p. 239
