The name of the man Orlando will marry is ornate and rare and fully deserving to be called ‘dark-plumed’: Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine, ‘Bonthrop’ for short. Personally I prefer ‘Luiz’ but that’s another story. Again, we see Orlando’s love of fallen feathers of steel-blue hue. And I like the notion of a name suggesting ‘a thousand other things’.
‘… the wild, dark-plumed name – a name which had, in her mind, the steel-blue gleam of rooks’ wings, the hoarse laughter of their caws, and snake-like twisting descent of their feathers in a silver pool, and a thousand other things which will be described presently.’
Source: Virginia Woolf, Orlando: A Biography, ed. with an introduction by Rachel Bowlby (Oxford: World’s Classics, 1992), p. 239
