Orlando

by Virginia Woolf

Paperback, 1960

Status

Available

Call number

823.912

Genres

Collection

Your library

Publication

Signet (1960), Paperback, 224 pages

Description

Orlando doubles as first an Elizabethan nobleman and then as a Victorian heroine who undergoes all the transitions of history in this novel that examines sex roles and social mores.

Media reviews

Review of Orlando (Love Books Review)

"Orlando" by Virginia Woolf, published in 1928, is a semi-biographical novel that explores the themes of gender, identity, and the nature of art through the life of its protagonist, Orlando. The novel spans over three centuries, beginning in the Elizabethan era and ending in the 1920s. Orlando, who

starts the novel as a young nobleman in the court of Queen Elizabeth I, undergoes a mysterious transformation into a woman midway through the book, living on through various historical periods while barely aging.

The narrative is notable for its lyrical prose, playful tone, and speculative approach to history and biography. Woolf uses Orlando's unique experiences to critique societal norms, particularly those relating to gender and sexuality, and to question the constraints these norms impose on individuals' lives. The novel also reflects on the nature of writing and literature, as Orlando aspires to be a poet, struggling with literary creation across centuries.

"Orlando" is considered a pioneering work in the genre of gender-fluid and transgender literature, and it has been celebrated for its ahead-of-its-time commentary on gender roles and identity. It was inspired by Woolf's close friend and lover, Vita Sackville-West, and can be seen as a love letter to Vita, exploring themes of androgyny and the complexity of human relationships. The novel remains a significant work in Woolf's oeuvre and in the broader landscape of 20th-century literature, admired for its innovative narrative technique and its bold examination of identity and artistic expression.

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— 1 more

The Guardian

Next time anyone tries to tell you – as people often do – that Virginia Woolf was a cold fish, just direct them to her seductive writing about winter. It warms the heart.

User reviews

LibraryThing member soniaandree

This is a great book, extremely well written and the storyline is interesting. Orlando, who is Elizabeth I's favourite pet companion, lives an adventurous life through the following ages and centuries, in different nations. His/her change of gender in Turkey sends her into a confusion of the

genres, whilst reflecting the ages' preoccupations. Whilst elevated, the language is lyrical, sometimes poetical and practical, with a focus on Orlando's own narrative inner voice, her reflections on life, society and her role within a seemingly linear chronology.

Orlando's life is a reflection of Vita Sackville West's familiar grounds and life. Some readers may interpret the book as a declaration of love or as a philosophical discussion about gender and a nation's historical changes through Orlando's life. It is open to interpretation and it is well worth reading the book for the multitude of questions it opens. A highly recommended classic.

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LibraryThing member nmhale

This was the first novel by Woolf that I read, and her masterful skill with words held my attention, which is impressive, considering that the plot of this story begins with Orlando, a young boy, and ends hundreds of years later with Orlando, a mature woman. Orlando, the same person. Woolf offers

no apologies for the passage of years, and only a very funny "explanation" of how Orlando changes gender midlife. The book claims to be a biography, and this tongue-in-cheek premise sets the stage for the droll humor that permeates the rest of the novel. Yet the novel manages to be profound and dramatic within this construct.

Nevertheless, Woolf's language play is even more incredible than the storyline. She creates metaphors that are poetry in prose, and her creative use of lists is another strong technique. She also uses some very clever allusions. I love the characters Purity, Temperance, and Chastity, who physically make an appearance when Orlando changes gender and try to cover her, while cleverly providing a reason for Woolf not to describe how the miracle takes place. Her writing is lyrical.

I read this book twice. First, just because I wanted to, and the second time for a group read. I'm very glad that I read it a second time. The first time, I was captivated by her use of words, but the story lost me several times, and I put it down frequently. The second time, already knowing what to expect plot wise, I was able to appreciate the craft of the novel, and at the same time, understand the story and characters more deeply and stay focused.

This book has a lot to offer. Orlando's life spans several ages of London life, from Queen Elizabeth, through James and Victoria, and through the eyes of her main character, Woolf offers interesting criticism of each. Her perspective on gender is another central theme, which she can explore from two angles, thanks to her character's unique personality. Not content with those broad motifs, Woolf further ponders the themes of love and life. With her language, intriguing characters, and complex themes and metaphors, this story is well worth a read, and then another, to fully appreciate this work from Virginia Woolf.

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LibraryThing member dczapka

If the thought of Virginia Woolf intimidates you -- or if you're more familiar with Edward Albee's ubiquitous play than you are with any of Woolf's work -- then Orlando is the novel for you. It's bizarre and unusual, but also, unlike much of Woolf's later work, remarkably accessible and

compulsively readable.

The novel purports to be the biography of a young nobleman named Orlando, born during the Elizabethan age and destined to become a great power in his time. Instead of settling into a typical noble life, however, Orlando undergoes an astonishing number of calamities -- not the least of which is his transformation from a man to a woman -- and traverses over three centuries of history while aging only thirty-odd years.

Despite the fantastical elements, Woolf's great attribute in the novel is her ability to tell the tale with a fairly objective eye, one that forgoes many of the modern techniques that mark her more famous and more difficult works. Her sentences do flow marvelously, and her paragraphs though long float effortlessly from page to page, but there is never a sense of psychological overload. Rather, her constant asides to the work of biographers both grounds her in a fact-based tradition and lampoons the style at the same time.

Orlando's romps through the centuries are each tinged with unique moments, some of which are incredibly fascinating and some which do, admittedly, tend to drag. (One particular sequence involving Alexander Pope, for instance, lacks the zest of Orlando's interactions with, say, Nick Greene.) The absurdity of Woolf's world, however, drives the action forward, and the casualness with which Orlando becomes a woman and swims through time keeps the mood light even when the action threatens to take a serious tone.

Orlando is a unique work in that it showcases Virginia Woolf at perhaps the height of her imaginative powers, but remains genuinely charming and delightfully accessible. A fine first step for the budding Woolf enthusiast, Orlando is perhaps underrated but well worth considering among her very best work.

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LibraryThing member MusicMom41

What an amazing book this was. It was like a wild ride in an amusement park--so much fun but I always felt a little off balance. However, I just loved the humor throughout the entire story.
The book begins with Orlando’s birth and childhood and how he grows to be a “beautiful” young man and a

favorite of Queen Elizabeth I near the end of her reign. Later King Charles sends him as Ambassador to Turkey and the descriptions of his ambassadorial duties are the stuff of Grouch Marx--hilarious.
While in Turkey Orlando falls into a prolonged trance like sleep and when Orlando awakes she is now a woman. VW’s thoughts on how people conform to society's ideas of gender roles, and how important clothing is, freeing the male and restricting the female are thought provoking but, again, I was more entranced with the humor as she describes the society of the time—a much later time than when Orlando was a man. I'm a huge Georgette Heyer fan and the descriptions of the society functions Orlando attends reminded me of the time Heyer writes about. VW had me practically rolling on the floor--the "assemblies," the "tea parties," and the "witty, intellectual gatherings" were a hoot. Part of this book seems to be a great "send up" of so many British customs and mores--her acerbic wit is delightful.
This last section was the most difficult for me to keep track of what was going on--I think because it moved so quickly through so many different moods. The novel ends on October 11th 1928—Orlando is over 400 years old. In many of her novels Virginia Woolf seems to love “playing with time!”
I enjoyed it but feel I need to read it again because I'm sure I missed a lot the first time through. Her style seems to change with each new novel of hers I read and I always get more from her books when I reread the--which I will be doing with this one also.

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LibraryThing member emily_morine

Forgive me, my Woolf in Winter friends: I must admit that I did not actually re-read Orlando with you over the course of the past two weeks. I am currently fighting hip-deep through the wilds of Julio Cortázar's Hopscotch; as delightful as I knew Woolf would be, I feared that if I once turned away

from Cortázar he would blindside me with a cleverly-aimed exhalation from his ever-present Gauloise and I would be turned to stone. Or at least to a stylishly pretentious 1960s hipster. You can understand why I would want to avoid that risk at any cost. HOWEVER. Never fear, because the day I am no longer able to write about Orlando is the day you should all break into my house and cart me off to the old folks' home.

Woolf wrote this novel as a break from more serious endeavors, and as a kind of love-letter to or mock biography of her sometime-lover Vita Sackville-West, whose family, like Orlando's, could date their genteel pedigree back to the days of Shakespeare, and who, like Orlando, had a passionate attachment to her family home (which she, being female, could not inherit). One of my favorite, favorite things about this novel is the way in which it transformed a passing infatuation, waning even as Woolf worked on this manuscript, into a vibrant, funny creative project. The end result is a sort-of-novel that doesn't offer up easy answers to the problem of loving another person or that of making art, but which manages to be delightful and playfully satirical while also, this being Woolf, incorporating a good deal of depth, and playing on themes of artistic androgyny that she develops more seriously in A Room of One's Own. Were I to receive such a love letter? I would be putty in the sender's hands. (In fact, Orlando was pretty central to my courtship with my own partner, and a model for our own humble attempts at cooperative art projects.)

She was certainly feeling more herself. Her finger had not tingled once, or nothing to count, since that night on the moor. Yet, she could not deny that she had her doubts. She was married, true; but if one's husband was always sailing round Cape Horn, was it marriage? if one liked him, was it marriage? If one liked other people, was it marriage? And finally, if one still wished, more than anything in the whole world, to write poetry, was it marriage? She had her doubts.

One of the things that strikes me, thinking about Orlando on the heels of the Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse readalongs, is Woolf's relative patriotism in this novel. Throughout her works she is critical of the British Empire for its cost in human life abroad (Septimus Smith) and of English society in general for its repressiveness ("women can't write, women can't paint"; William Bradshaw's goddess of Conversion). And yet, as Peter Walsh notes, even in people who actively dislike Empire, "there were moments...of pride in England." While she continues to poke fun at the ridiculousness of Britishness in Orlando, Woolf's lighter tone and farcical approach allow her to portray her country more as one would the foibles of an exasperating yet beloved great-aunt, and less in a mood of white-hot rage or tragedy. The character Orlando, after all, is an embodiment of the "spirit of the age" in Britain, and Woolf can't be in enamored of Orlando without feeling some tenderness toward the country - even in its most Victorian stages.

Once there, she followed what had now become the most imperious need of her nature and wrapped herself as well as she could in a damask quilt which she snatched from her bed. She explained to the Widow Bartholomew as housekeeper) that she felt chilly.

"So do we all, m'lady," said the Widow, heaving a profound sigh. "The walls is sweating," she said, with a curious, lugubrious complacency, and sure enough, she had only to lay her hand on the oak panels for the fingerprints to be marked there. The ivy had grown so profusely that many windows were now sealed up. The kitchen was so dark that they could scarcely tell a kettle from a cullender. A poor black cat had been mistaken for coals and shovelled on the fire. Most of the maids were already wearing three or four red-flannel petticoats, though the month was August.

I love the fantastical and hilarious way in which Woolf has even Orlando's physical surroundings mirror the "spirit of the age" (whatever age s/he might be living through at the moment). In the Great Freeze of Elizabethan England we get carnivalesque scenes of apple-sellers completely frozen in the ice; the diplomatic seventeenth century brings tent-labyrinths with endless cups of strong coffee; the Romantic era sets the reader adrift in lightning storms and wind-wracked forests; the nineteenth century is ushered in with an monumental, over-decorated monstrosity and an oddly pervasive foggy chill. Orlando and the other characters are swept along irresistibly with the changing zeitgeist, and I laugh out loud every time I read the distressingly fast-forwarded transition from the freewheeling eighteenth century to the damp, dark nineteenth. All representations are caricatures, of course, but they're lovingly crafted and well-realized to a fault.

And then there's the brilliant character of Nick Greene, who spends eternity lamenting the fall of "modern literature" from its glory days--usually located a few centuries before his current diatribe, whenever that might happen to be. From a penniless Elizabethan playwright complaining of pains in his back, running down Shakespeare for a money-grubbing hack, and mocking Orlando's poetry in print in order to make a quick pound, he evolves into "the most influential critic of the Victorian age." Orlando, however, somehow prefers his earlier, less respectable incarnation, gossiping about poets and pressing Orlando for a pension, paid quarterly:

There was one knob about the third from the top which burnt like fire; another about the second from the bottom which was cold as ice. Sometimes he woke with a brain like lead; at others it was as if a thousand wax tapers were alight and people were throwing fireworks inside him. He could feel a rose leaf through his mattress, he said; and knew his way almost about London by the feel of the cobbles. Altogether he was a piece of machinery so finely made and so curiously put together (here he raised his hand as if unconsciously and indeed, it was of the finest shape imaginable) that it confounded him to think that he had only sold five hundred copies of his poem, but that of course was largely due to the conspiracy against him. All he could say, he concluded, banging his fist upon the table, was that the art of poetry was dead in England.

I must admit that the semi-personal nature of Orlando does lead to some flaws as well as delights. At times it feels in-jokey, too self-consciously clever, and the overwhelming Britishness of it can get to seem like a bit much for those who aren't, like me, firm Anglophiles. It also has that awkward trait in which white authors attempt to depict non-white people sympathetically and end up othering them in a somewhat cringe-worthy way (although, I do like the moment when the gypsy leader tells Orlando that he won't hold her father's Dukedom against her). Despite these drawbacks, though, this novel has a warm place in my heart, and I look forward to many re-reads, even if I must now plough on with Cortázar. Onward!

(If you loved the atmospheric lyricism of Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, consider joining us for the final Woolf in Winter discussion. Claire will be hosting The Waves two weeks from now, on Friday, February 26.)

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LibraryThing member SandDune

I've read some Virginia Woolf before but this is very different. In fact, in a strange way what it reminds me of more than anything is A Hundred Days of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez: there are definite overtones of magic realism here.

Orlando is introduced to the reader as he practises his

fencing by attacking the dried up heads of Moors brought back from the crusades by his father (or was it grandfather) in the attic of the mansion owned by his family for generations. And this is the first clue perhaps that time in this book does not flow as quickly as might be expected, for Orlando is a boy in the later days of Elizabeth I, and the crusades are long gone. But his ambitions of martial glory are thwarted by the Queen, who ordains that a military life is too dangerous for her favourite. So Orlando becomes a young man at the court of Elizabeth I and falls in and out of love, all the while concealing his desire to write, as to be a writer is not at all a respectable thing for an aristocrat. But time passes very slowly indeed for Orlando (although in the best tradition of magic realism, this is not commented on, or even seemingly noticed by Orlando himself or those around him) When Orlando requests the king to send him abroad as an ambassador to avoid the unwanted attentions of a suitor, the king is Charles II, more than seventy years have passed since he was the favourite of Queen Elizabeth, but Orlando is still a young man of less than thirty. And it's while an ambassador to the Turkish Court at Constantinople that Orlando's life changes for ever, as he becomes a woman overnight. There is no explanation of this, and although there are court cases aplenty to determine his legal situation on his return to England, the reality of the situation is accepted without query by all around him.

On my first reading of the book I was expecting a very different book from the one that I thought I eventually got, and I think that detracted slightly from my enjoyment. On this second reading I just went with the flow and enjoyed the ride, as here when the break-up of the frozen Thames is being described:

'Where for three months and more, there had been solid ice of such thickness that it seemed permanent as stone, and a whole gay city has been stood on its pavement, was now a race of turbulent yellow waters. The river had gained its freedom in the night. It was as if a sulphur spring (to which view many philosophers inclined) had risen from the volcanic regions beneath and burst the ice asunder with such vehemence that it swept the huge and massy fragments furiously apart. The mere look of the water was enough to turn one giddy. All was riot and confusion. The river was strewn with icebergs. Some of these were as broad as a bowling green and as high as a house; others no bigger than a man's hat, but most fantastically twisted. Now would come down a whole convoy of ice blocks sinking everything that stood in their way. Now, eddying and swirling like a tortured serpent, the river would seem to be hurtling itself between the fragments and tossing them from bank to bank, so they could be heard smashing against the piers and pillars. But what was the most awful and inspiring of terror was the sight of the human creatures who had been trapped in the night and now paced their twisting and precarious islands in the utmost agony of spirit. Whether they jumped into the flood or stayed on the ice their doom was certain.'

A strange book that is apparently a tribute to Vita-Sackville-West. Nothing is ever explained, and quite a lot makes very little sense but it has some interesting thoughts on gender and the nature of time.

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LibraryThing member LisaMaria_C

Orlando is subtitled "a biography" and for the most part that's how it's written. As if Woolf was writing the biography of this member of the English nobility--who is 36 years old after over 300 years--and who switches genders from a man to a woman about half way through. So this is part historical

fiction and part fantasy. Although more magical realism. The book doesn't like ordinary fantasy flow along ordinary lines in a world where magic is real. Rather it's fantastical in ways it can be hard to wrap around if you insist on a straightforward reality.

I was shocked by how much I loved this book until (almost) the very end. I loved Woolf's essay, "A Room of One's Own" when I first encountered it in my early teens. It's a classic defense of women's abilities, and I revisited it recently after reading Camille Paglia's Sexual Personae, which reads almost like a refutation of it--I found myself sucked in and rereading almost the entire essay--it's not just a classic feminist work, it's a classic work about literature. Orlando hits a lot of its themes, and so brilliantly I thought this would be a book I'd return to again and I'd definitely give the highest possible rating--until anyway I hit the last half of the last part.

To understand my reservations, you'd have to understand my reaction to another work I was introduced to in my teens--Woolf's most famous novel, Mrs Dalloway. Reader, I detested it. It became my bete noire as I was assigned it again and again in high school and college, taking to Monarch and Cliff Notes to survive without having to actually complete the book. I have little tolerance for the stream-of-consciousness technique which dominates that novel. I hate James Joyce, William Faulkner and (almost) all their works. I've read that the technique can be valuable in rendering a chaotic mind, and in touches I can see it as effective, but for me pages of it marred Toni Morrison's Beloved, and a novel-full of it is more than I can stand. Mrs Dalloway I found tedious and incoherent. But not only did I want to love the author of "A Room of One's Own," a friend of mine who didn't care for Mrs Dalloway adored Orlando. Orlando for most of its length is free of a stream of consciousness narrative--until, I think not uncoincidentally, we reach the time around Woolf's birth and the beginning of the modern era, and suddenly I have Mrs Dalloway again.

Not that there is as large a break in styles as you might think from my comments. Woolf's style is easy to recognize. A single paragraph can take pages, and a single sentence, kept aloft by endless semi-colons... Well, let me give you an example:

Nature, who has played so many queer tricks upon us, making us so unequally of clay and diamonds, of rainbow and granite, and stuffed them into a case, often of the most incongruous, for the poet has a butcher’s face and the butcher a poet’s; nature, who delights in muddle and mystery, so that even now (the first of November, 1927) we know not why we go upstairs, or why we come down again, our most daily movements are like the passage of a ship on an unknown sea, and the sailors at the mast-head ask, pointing their glasses to the horizon: Is there land or is there none? to which, if we are prophets, we make answer “Yes”; if we are truthful we say “No”; nature, who has so much to answer for besides the perhaps unwieldy length of this sentence, has further complicated her task and added to our confusion by providing not only a perfect ragbag of odds and ends within us—a piece of a policeman’s trousers lying cheek by jowl with Queen Alexandra’s wedding veil—but has contrived that the whole assortment shall be lightly stitched together by a single thread.

Yes, that's one sentence. But it's wise and gorgeous--and it's something else--something that can be said about almost the entire book: it's hilarious. Notice her comment about her own sentence being unwieldy? Did I completely miss the sense of humor in Mrs Dalloway or was it just missing there? I did notice from time to time beautiful language and imagery even in that novel, and it's certainly present here. This is technically a dense read--little white space and very interior. There was not much dialogue and as I noted sentences and paragraphs that seemingly go on forever. And yet, yes, I did find this a page-turner, in the sense I was riveted and found it impossible to not speed through it even as I wanted to slow down and savor so much of the prose. It's the kind of book I can imagine returning to. So yes, even though my eyes rather glazed over because of the style of the last pages, I decided this is nothing short of amazing and for me worthy of five stars.

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LibraryThing member Marse

"Orlando" is one of those books that is not about what you think it is about. I watched the movie years ago and thought I knew what this book was going to be, but what the movie focuses on and what the book is about are two different things. It is, of course, about the sexes, but also about

personhood, time, literature, history. Woolf has a wonderful way of lifting the reader's own perception of the story so beyond plot and character that I, at least, have a hard time remembering what actually happens, and want to reread the book just for the exhilaration of the flight through its pages.

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LibraryThing member deebee1

This book was a joy to read. Exuberant, fanciful, exemplifying literature at its finest. This semi-biographical novel is partly based on the life of Vita Sackville-West, an intimate friend of Woolf. Orlando is a character who is liberated from the restraints of time and gender. He starts as a young

nobleman in the Elizabethan era and ends as a modern woman three hundred years later. Woolf explores the theme of femininity and roles of men and women within certain cultural (English mainly and Oriental) and historical contexts through some bizarre and outrageous devices (e.g. Orlando is not the only androgynous character). The reader is taken on a wild and playful ride, from his days as a young steward of the queen and on the throes of passion for a Russian princess, his devastation on her desertion, to a period of ambassadorship in Constantinople where he awakes one day as a woman, to time spent with the gypsies, and eventually, to her return to modern-day England. The 2 constant things through all this was her passion for writing, and search for love -- the fulfillment of which she finally found towards the end of her 300-year journey (signifying the drastic difference of the social milieu and implications for women in general). The novel is full of wit, and where Orlando has moments of ambiguity and confusion (owing mostly to social restraints of the era) -- which she would after a round of internal debate, invariably junk, i found hilarious.

This publication of this book in 1928, was a hallmark in literature, especially in regard to women's writing and gender studies, for obvious reasons.

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LibraryThing member grunin

An extraordinary caprice by Woolf: a 'biography' whose subject is, like an oak tree, effectively immortal and androgynous. (There are also several other characters who are one or both.)

Some of the best -- i.e. least simplistic -- thinking about culturally-defined sex roles I have ever read,

including observations of how they have mutated over the past four centuries. She asserts, for example, that the Victorian era was a regressive one for women.

The last part of the book is an extended reverie, which I found a little monotonous, but I'll give it another chance.

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LibraryThing member jonbrammer

Notes on Orlando

Magical realism - feels like Marquez
The sweep of history married to the poetic descriptions of the moment, the impressionistic (third person) experience of the moment.
Woolf’s most incongruous novel. Fits a lot (maybe too much) into its modest frame. Commentary on history and

literature and the history of literature.
Is the character of Orlando the best vehicle for Woolf’s objectives in this novel?
Gender -the border between male and female is porous. Woolf is placing herself in the (male) lineage of English literature going back to Shakespeare. She is also quite sardonic and cynical about the actual quality this lineage produced. The patronage system can promote mediocrity (Nick Greene). This is a very subtly feminist novel. She claims the rights of femininity along with the privileges of masculinity.

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LibraryThing member fleurdiabolique

You know, this could have been a good book. I am definitely interested in the sort of premise of the last two-thirds. But my potential enjoyment of the book was ruined by the fact that this book purports to be a biography, or at least a straightforward narrative, for the first third or so -- and

then, without warning or explanation, our hero abruptly becomes a transsexual time traveler. Though the book has to this point been fairly realistic, no one reacts as though Orlando's gender switch is odd, and no one thinks it's strange that s/he suddenly appears again over a century after his/her birth. Again, this would have been _fine_ if it was set up. But it wasn't. Woolf begins in a realistic mode, and there is absolutely no good excuse, save sheer perversity, for turning the reader topsy-turvy in this manner. After 130 pages of apparently realistic prose, an abrupt shift (which makes use of an extremely trite use of allegorical figures, I might add) to the realm of the fantastic is confusing and illogical. And the book just goes downhill from there. People from the sixteenth century appear in later centuries -- again, without any explanation and without any expression of surprise on anyone's part. Orlando's house staff from the 1500s is waiting for her when she returns in the early 1700s -- but then they all die by the 1800s, though she is still alive. She marries, and after her husband leaves on a trip we pretty much never find out what the hell happens to him. She gives birth (when she actually got pregnant is yet another question), and her child isn't mentioned after that moment. Jumps in time during the course of the narrative are profoundly unclear. And why doesn't anyone around Orlando seem to remark on the fact that she seems to be immortal?! And of course, woven through all of this at intervals is intolerable "philsophical" prattling which rarely has any depth.

As usual, Woolf is too busy trying to be unusual and shocking to bother writing something actually readable. It is so frustrating, because there are a few beautiful passages, and the idea behind the last two-thirds or so of the novel is really interesting and could have made a wonderful book on its own. But these sparks of something better are drowned in Woolf's usual overly-self-conscious, self-indulgent prose. If you really must read any of this (and I advise against it), go only as far as the point where Orlando falls into a trance in Constantinople. There is absolutely nothing worth your time and energy beyond that point.

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LibraryThing member Othemts

A fantastic novel in which a young courtier from the time of Elizabeth magically lives for four centuries without aging, even more magically changing sex from man to woman halfway through. This humorous book satirizes the politics of all the eras Orlando lives through, and more so challenges the

gender roles across time. Very different from any other Woolf novel I've read. Sally Potter made an excellent film based on the novel staring Tilda Swinton as Orlando, but definitely read the book first.

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LibraryThing member SaraPrindiville

Seems like the very beginning of magical realism. I've never read anything like it from that time period. Extremely symbolic. The author is very interested in androgyny, but also, and mainly in coming to terms with oneself and the world. Balancing the yin and yang if you will.

LibraryThing member NocturnalLibrarian

This is by far one of Woolf's most entertaining novels. Her exploration of androgyny, gender, class and feminism leaves one at once amused and fantastically intrigued.

LibraryThing member rebeccler

Magical realism saved Orlando from being targeted for obscenity. A delicious tale of a writer's growth into herself, and out of himself. The biographer's commentary is often hilarious, and do pay special attention to the cross-dressing section for hints of the "obscene" according to Lord Campbell's

Act of 1857. It isn't there, but it is there.

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LibraryThing member HeatherLee

Orlando is a man attracted to a Russian woman in trousers who looks like a man. A despondent Orlando goes to Turkey as an ambassador and emerges as a woman. Orlando is pursued by a man who is a woman. Orlando falls in love with a man and in a bizarre sequence they confess to each other that they

are the other sex. But they remain the sex in which they presented themselves to each other, get married, and Orlando has a baby. Oh, and all this takes over three centuries.

It's easy to see why Virginia Woolf is admired by modernists, litarati and feminists. Woolf transitions seamlessly between gender and centuries in a classic of modernism that can just as easily be labeled postmodern today.

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LibraryThing member riverwillow

I studied this as part of my degree and slowly this book began to grow on me. Its

LibraryThing member gbill

It’s a mistake to reduce this book, as Vita Sackville-West’s son did, to ‘the longest and most charming love letter in literature’. I hate that characterization. While clearly inspired (and dedicated) to her lover for a few years in the mid 1920’s, an affair that neither husband

apparently objected to, this book is far more than that. In ‘Orlando’ Woolf explores the individual’s role in society, what it means to be a woman or a man, what it means to be rich, and in short, what it means to live. Along the way she is whimsical, fantastical, and progressive in both her experimental prose, and her feminism. This is a profound book, not a simple expression of adoration.

Much is made of Orlando ‘magically’ transforming into a woman midway through the book, and in the fact that he, then she, lives for hundreds of years, both of which are completely unexplained by Woolf. In having Orlando transform into a woman, and in describing her later as having multiple selves, all at the same time, Woolf explodes the view that we as individuals are one thing, or need to define ourselves that way. In having Orlando live for centuries, she shows that cultural norms will change, and that even though we may not always perceive that fact, we can open our minds, live unconstrained, and embrace progress. Included in what’s arbitrary are clothing and sexual preference, which is liberating.

At the same time, the book is sentimental at times. Written at age 46, Woolf both remembered her past through mature eyes, and had a better understanding of her own mortality. This manifests itself in Orlando’s character as having her essentially be middle-aged across centuries, observing changes in London, society, and scientific progress, while occasionally calling up memories from long ago. This puts our situation as individuals with relatively short lives in extremis, magnifying the act of recollection and memory that normally spans decades, and yet also shows the thread of humanity at large continuing on through all these years.

Woolf was troubled, having suffered sexual abuse by two older half-brothers growing up, and headaches throughout her life which culminated in occasional breakdowns, and her tragic suicide at age 59. Read her words, look at the beautiful pictures of Vita which illustrate the book, particularly “Orlando on her return to England”, and enjoy her moment in the sun.

Quotes:
On how complex individuals are; I loved this one, especially with the tongue-in-cheek ‘unwieldy length of this sentence’:
“Nature, who has played so many queer tricks upon us, making us so unequally of clay and diamonds, of rainbow and granite, and stuffed them into a case, often of the most incongruous, for the poet has a butcher’s face and the butcher’s a poet’s; nature, who delights in muddle and mystery, so that even now (the first of November, 1927) we know not why we go upstairs, or why we come down again, our most daily movements are like the passage of a ship on an unknown sea, and the sailors at the mast-head ask, pointing their glasses to the horizon: Is there land or is there none? to which, if we are prophets, we make answer ‘Yes’; if we are truthful we say ‘No’; nature, who has so much to answer for besides the perhaps unwieldy length of this sentence, has further complicated her task and added to our confusion by providing not only a perfect ragbag of odds and ends within us – a piece of a policeman’s trousers lying cheek by jowl with Queen Alexandra’s wedding veil – but has contrived that the whole assortment shall be lightly stitched together by a single thread. Memory is the seamstress, and a capricious one at that. Memory runs her needle in and out, up and down, hither and thither. We know not what comes next, or what follows after. Thus, the most ordinary movement in the world, such as sitting down at a table and pulling the inkstand towards one, may agitate a thousand odd, disconnected fragments, now bright, now dim, hanging and bobbing and dipping and flaunting, like the underlinen of a family of fourteen on a line in a gale of wind. Instead of being a single, downright, bluff piece of work of which no man need feel ashamed, our commonest deeds are set about with a fluttering and flickering of wings, a rising and falling of lights.”

On memories, and the art of life:
“’Time has passed over me,’ she thought, trying to collect herself; ‘this is the oncome of middle age. How strange it is! Nothing is any longer one thing. I take up a handbag and I think of an old bumboat woman frozen in the ice. Someone lights a pink candle and I see a girl in Russian trousers. When I step out of doors – as I do now,’ here she stepped on to the pavement of Oxford Street, ‘what is it that I taste? Little herbs. I hear goat bells. I see mountains. Turkey? India? Persia?’ Her eyes filled with tears.
That Orlando had gone a little too far from the present moment will, perhaps, strike the reader who sees her now preparing to get into her motor car with her eyes full of tears and visions of Persian mountains. And indeed, it cannot be denied that the most successful practitioners of the art of life, often unknown people by the way, somehow contrive to synchronize the sixty or seventy different times which beat simultaneously in every normal human system so that when eleven strikes, all the rest chime in unison, and the present is neither a violent disruption nor completely forgotten in the past.”

On the rich:
“Looked at from the gipsy point of view, a Duke, Orlando understood, was nothing but a profiteer or robber who snatched land money from people who rated these things of little worth, and could think of nothing better to do than to build three hundred and sixty-five bedrooms when one was enough, and none was even better than one. She could not deny that her ancestors had accumulated field after field; house after house; honour after honour; yet had none of them been saints or heroes, or great benefactors of the human race.”

On scientific progress:
“The very fabric of life now, she thought, as she rose, is magic. In the eighteenth century, we knew how everything was done; but here I rise through the air; I listen to voices in America; I see men flying – but how it’s done, I can’t even begin to wonder. So my belief in magic returns.”

On sex, I loved how she put this:
“In short, they acted the parts of man and woman for ten minutes with great vigour and then fell into natural discourse.”

On sexual identity:
“The difference between the sexes is, happily, one of great profundity. Clothes are but a symbol of something hid deep beneath. It was a change in Orlando herself that dictated her choice of a woman’s dress and of a woman’s sex. And perhaps in this she was only expressing more openly than usual – openness indeed was the soul of her nature – something that happens to most people without being thus plainly expressed. For here again, we come to a dilemma. Different though the sexes are, they intermix. In every human being a vacillation from one sex to the other takes place, and often it is only the clothes that keep the male or female likeness, while underneath the sex is the very opposite of what it is above. Of the complications and confusions which thus result every one has had experience…”

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LibraryThing member stunik

. . character liberated from the restraints of time and sex. Born in the Elizabethan agte to wealth and position, Orlando is a lusty young nobleman at the beginning of the story and three centuries later a modern woman. the hero-heroine sees monarchs come and go, hobnobs with the great literary

figures of every age, and slips in and out of each new fashion. In the Vicorian Age she dutifully puts on layers of petticoats, marries, and bears a child. In the twentieth century she drives a motor car and publishes a poem she has been writing since youth. The author leaves her at "the present moment." She is 36.-

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LibraryThing member nickdreamsong

A quote from one of my favorite Woolf novels and one of my favorite books of all time:

"Different though the sexes are, the intermix. In every human being a vacillation from one sex to the other takes place, and often it is only the clothes that keep the male or female likeness, while underneath the

sex is the very opposite of what is above."

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LibraryThing member bateleur

After reading this work, I thought I’d like my epitaph to be C… died aged 75, at last reckoning lived for 300 years.

LibraryThing member Hera

This is a great novel. Witty, clever and a great conceit. Too bad the rest of her novels aren't so good to read.

LibraryThing member amerynth

I didn't particularly enjoy Virginia Woolf's "Orlando". It was a rather fantastical yet dull story.... and I really wasn't able to discern what Woolf was trying to say.

There are a few brilliant passages of prose -- particularly the part with the frozen river Thames. The story is of a man who turns

into a woman and then lives 300 years.... I'm not sure what the point of it all was.

This is the fourth Woolf book I've read and she clearly isn't a good match for me. I only really enjoyed "The Years," which has a much more traditional narrative and style. There are several authors that I feel like I'm just not smart enough to understand and Woolf is among them.

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LibraryThing member LisaMorr

On the back cover it states that this is one of Virginia Woolf's most popular and entertaining works. Last year I had read Mrs. Dalloway, my first Woolf, and enjoyed it a lot more.

(VERY MILD SPOILERS)
The book was interesting, but it didn't grip me. It is a fantastical biography about Orlando,

starting with him as a 16-yr old boy sometime in the 1500's, who eventually turns into a woman (I don't think this is a spoiler - it's written on the back of the book...), and is still a relatively young woman when the novel ends in 1928. Orlando is rich with a large estate and is in good favor with the Queen. He has a romance with a Russian princess (at least we think she is), and many others, gets to be Ambassador to Turkey, turns into a woman, has more affairs, and so on.

There was lots of just the narrator stepping in and saying how this part is boring. Also, there were some confusing bits, like at one point I think she got pregnant, but it wasn't really clear. But then years later (I think) she gives birth. And then no mention of her child. I was used to that a bit from Mrs. Dalloway, but it was a lot worse in this book.

It took me a lot longer to read than it should have; I figured I definitely would have finished it by the end of the year, but it just dragged on and on, and it was a chore to finish.

I haven't said a lot of good things about the book, and I'm sorry about that. There were interesting parts here and there, and it did spawn a neat movie, but all in all, I didn't think it was that great.

I'm going to give it 3 stars; I'm vacillating a bit, quite ambivalent about it, but I think that's what it should get on my scale.

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