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Full title - Orlando: A Biography.
Woolf's father, Leslie Stephen, was until the early 1890s principal editor of the Dictíonary of National Biography, the great commemorative work of the Victorian period. Note her diary entry (1928, shortly after publication of Orlando):
Father's birthday. He would have been 1928-1832 / 96 96, yes, today & could have been 96, like other people one has known; but mercifully was not. His life would have entirely ended mine. What would have happened? No writing, no books; - inconceivable.

Feels father's influence would have stifled her creativity; not alone –
Gilbert and Gubar, in their monumental and influential work, The Madwoman in the Attic, write about the ‘anxiety of influence' – ie problem that all women writers have of establishing their independence of the male literary tradition (return to this subject later). But Woolf's is deliberate and personal reaction against her immediate male predecessor: because her book apparently belongs to the DNB genre of biography / historical picture / memoirs. These terms all appear in Woolf's first conception of the book:
One of these days, though, 1 shall sketch here, like a grand historical picture, the outlines of all my friends. [...] It might be a way of writing the memoirs of one's own times during peoples [sic] lifetimes. It might be a most amusing book, The question is how to do it. Vita [Sackville-West] should be Orlando, a young nobleman. There should be Lytton [Strachey], & it should be truthful; but fantastic. Roger [Fry]. Duncan [Grant]. Clive [Bell]. Adrian [Stephen].

Only Vita Sackville-West does actually feature in the book as Orlando.
But the novel has the same commemorative function as the DNB.

DNB articles are written to a formula, with a narrative structure of birth, marriage and death + summary of the subject's major achievements.
And project's dominated by the concept of the 'great man' or (more rarely) the 'great woman'.
So Orlando has...