Transfiguration(s)
Virginia Woolf’s Orlando is a novel about a man in Elizabethan England who is mysteriously transformed into a woman and who lives for over three hundred years. Woolf wrote it as a tribute to her friend and lover Vita Sackville-West.
That is true about Orlando. Also true, however, as Woolf wrote in 1938: “As a woman, I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman my country is the whole world.”
Few great novels are as brilliantly eccentric as . Few great novels are so heedless about plausibility. And few great novels so frustrate any.
