Orlando

By Virginia Woolf

HarperCollins is proud to present its new range of best-loved, essential classics.

‘The flower bloomed and faded. The sun rose and sank. The lover loved and went. And what the poets said in rhyme, the young translated into practice.’

Written for her lover Vita Sackville-West, ‘Orlando’ is Woolf’s playfully subversive take on a biography, here tracing the fantastical life of Orlando. As the novel spans centuries and continents, gender and identity, we follow Orlando’s adventures in love – from being a lord in the Elizabethan court to a lady in 1920s London.

First published in 1928, this tale of unrivalled imagination and wit quickly became the most famous work of women’s fiction. Sexuality, destiny, independence and desire – all come to the fore in this highly influential novel that heralded a new era in women’s writing.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins UK
• Release date: May 8, 2014
• ISBN: 9780007558094

Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) was an English novelist. Born in London, she was raised in a family of eight children by Julia Prinsep Jackson, a model and philanthropist, and Leslie Stephen, a writer and critic. Homeschooled alongside her sisters, including famed painter Vanessa Bell, Woolf was introduced to classic literature at an early age. Following the death of her mother in 1895, Woolf suffered her first mental breakdown. Two years later, she enrolled at King’s College London, where she studied history and classics and encountered leaders of the burgeoning women’s rights movement. Another mental breakdown accompanied her father’s death in 1904, after which she moved with her Cambridge-educated brothers to Bloomsbury, a bohemian district on London’s West End. There, she became a member of the influential Bloomsbury Group, a gathering of leading artists and intellectuals including Lytton Strachey, John Maynard Keynes, Vanessa Bell, E.M. Forster, and Leonard Woolf, whom she would marry in 1912. Together they founded the Hogarth Press, which would publish most of Woolf’s work. Recognized as a central figure of literary modernism, Woolf was a gifted practitioner of experimental fiction, employing the stream of consciousness technique and mastering the use of free indirect discourse, a form of third person narration which allows the reader to enter the minds of her characters. Woolf, who produced such masterpieces as Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), Orlando (1928), and A Room of One’s Own (1929), continued to suffer from depression throughout her life. Following the German Blitz on her native London, Woolf, a lifelong pacifist, died by suicide in 1941. Her career cut cruelly short, she left a legacy and a body of work unmatched by any English novelist of her day.

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ORLANDO

Virginia Woolf

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Copyright

William Collins

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This eBook edition published by William Collins in 2014

Life & Times section © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.

Fran Fabriczki asserts the moral right as author of the Life & Times section

Classic Literature: Words and Phrases adapted from

Collins English Dictionary

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Cover image: Young Man in Yellow with Bonnet and Feather, c.1585–90 (w/c on vellum), Hilliard, Nicholas (1547–1619) / Victoria & Albert Museum, London, UK / The Bridgeman Art Library

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Source ISBN: 9780007558087

Ebook Edition © May 2014 ISBN: 9780007558094

Version: 2023-03-09

Dedication

To Vita Sackville-West

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

History of Collins

Life & Times

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Footnotes

Classic Literature: Words and Phrases

About the Publisher

History of Collins

In 1819, millworker William Collins from Glasgow, Scotland, set up a company for printing and publishing pamphlets, sermons, hymn books, and prayer books. That company was Collins and was to mark the birth of HarperCollins Publishers as we know it today. The long tradition of Collins dictionary publishing can be traced back to the first dictionary William published in 1824, Greek and English Lexicon. Indeed, from 1840 onwards, he began to produce illustrated dictionaries and even obtained a licence to print and publish the Bible.

Soon after, William published the first Collins novel, Ready Reckoner; however, it was the time of the Long Depression, where harvests were poor, prices were high, potato crops had failed, and violence was erupting in Europe. As a result, many factories across the country were forced to close down and William chose to retire in 1846, partly due to the hardships he was facing.

Aged 30, William’s son, William II, took over the business. A keen humanitarian with a warm heart and a generous spirit, William II was truly Victorian in his outlook. He introduced new, up-to-date steam presses and published affordable editions of Shakespeare’s works and The Pilgrim’s Progress, making them available to the masses for the first time. A new demand for educational books meant that success came with the publication of travel books, scientific books, encyclopedias, and dictionaries. This demand to be educated led to the later publication of atlases, and Collins also held the monopoly on scripture writing at the time.

In the 1860s Collins began to expand and diversify and the idea of books for the millions was developed. Affordable editions of classical literature were published, and in 1903 Collins introduced 10 titles in their Collins Handy Illustrated Pocket Novels. These proved so popular that a few years later this had increased to an output of 50 volumes, selling nearly half a million in their year of publication. In the same year, The Everyman’s Library was also instituted, with the idea of publishing an affordable library of the most important classical works, biographies, religious and philosophical treatments, plays, poems, travel, and adventure. This series eclipsed all competition at the time, and the introduction of paperback books in the 1950s helped to open that market and marked a high point in the industry.

HarperCollins is and has always been a champion of the classics, and the current Collins Classics series follows in this tradition – publishing classical literature that is affordable and available to all. Beautifully packaged, highly collectible, and intended to be reread and enjoyed at every opportunity.

Life & Times

In an early critical essay, Virginia Woolf muses on the possibility of finding future classics among her contemporaries: ‘Here, if we could recognize it, lies some poem, or novel, or history which will stand up and speak with other ages about our age.’ The modern reader can’t help but smile at the dramatic irony, for it would be Woolf herself, decades on, who would become embedded in the canon of English literature, giving testament to her times. Woolf was born at the precipice of a tumultuous age: her life would come to encompass the end of the Victorian era, the suffragette movement and two world wars. Her writing traces the arc of these seismic changes, ranging from early realist novels that tied her to her literary predecessors, to polemical works on the rights of women and war, to the increasing unconventionality of her later works.

Early years

Her eventual ascent to literary fame is perhaps less surprising when taken in the context of her upbringing. Woolf’s father, Leslie Stephen, was an eminent Victorian biographer, whose literary connections included icons such as William Makepeace Thackeray, Henry James and Thomas Hardy. Her mother, Julia Prinsep, was a renowned beauty who was photographed and painted by important contemporary artists. Stephen and Prinsep married in 1878, both bringing children from earlier marriages, one and three respectively, and eventually having four more children together. Their family home in Hyde Park bustled with activity, as did their house in Cornwall, which would later become the inspiration for the setting of Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927). While Woolf’s brothers went to school, she and her sister Vanessa were mostly educated at home (although Woolf later attended classes at King’s College London), where their father’s tastes had a significant influence on their learning. The Stephen children were a precocious bunch with a variety of intellectual and artistic interests. Notably, Vanessa would become a famous artist in her own right, and their younger brother, Adrian, a psychoanalyst. As children they produced a weekly newspaper for their parents, and no doubt imbibed much of the intellectual milieu they grew up in. However, Woolf’s happy childhood was marred by the abuse her elder half-siblings inflicted upon her, of which she writes in her later autobiographical works. Woolf suffered further mental strain when her mother, by her accounts the epicentre of their family life, passed away in 1895 when Virginia was only thirteen. After their mother’s death, their father became a tyrannical figure in the life of the family; nonetheless, when he passed away in 1904, Woolf suffered a second mental breakdown.

New beginnings in Bloomsbury

Although the death of her father deeply affected Woolf, it was also the last tether tying her to her childhood, and the family’s move to a new home in Bloomsbury brought with it a sense of liberation in many ways. In their new home the family were no longer burdened by the social codes of the previous generation and entertained a wide variety of guests in a casual manner. Woolf’s brother Thoby had gone to Cambridge, where he met the likes of Lytton Strachey, Clive Bell, John Maynard Keynes and Leonard Woolf (Virginia’s future husband), who became good friends of the siblings. At their new home Thoby hosted ‘Thursday Evenings’, a series of informal get-togethers where the attendees discussed the intellectual interests of the day. The group that formed in the rooms of 46 Gordon Square would become the stuff of literary legend, with many of them going on to achieve great acclaim in their respective fields and their ever-entangled personal lives continuing to provide fodder for gossip. Although in many ways this was a joyously liberating time for Woolf, it was not without its difficulties. Thoby died of typhoid in 1906 and Vanessa married Clive Bell the year after – thus the siblings’ close life together came to an end.

The following years were intellectually formative – Woolf took part in the suffragist movement, had close ties to the Post-Impressionist Exhibition that shocked London society, wrote reviews for the TLS and began to write what would later become The Voyage Out (1915). She continued to suffer from poor mental health, undergoing several weeks of ‘rest cure’ in the countryside.

The Hogarth Press and partnership with Leonard Woolf

In 1911, Leonard Woolf returned from Ceylon where he was in the Civil Service and renewed his friendship with Virginia’s circle. In 1912, Virginia and Leonard married, beginning a lifelong partnership that was as much intellectual as romantic. The couple moved to Richmond in 1915 and together founded the Hogarth Press. The small publishing house was not only a means of publishing their own work, but an introduction to many formative literary and intellectual figures, such as Katherine Mansfield, whose Prelude (1918) was published by the Hogarth Press, as well as Sigmund Freud, whose works they were the first to publish in English, and who had a great influence on the thinking of many in the Bloomsbury Group. Woolf herself, after having her first two novels published elsewhere, published all subsequent works through the Hogarth Press, thus retaining greater creative control over her work.

Artistic maturity and Orlando

The 1920s was an incredibly productive decade for Woolf, during which she published four of her major novels, including Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927) and a short story collection called Monday or Tuesday (1921). Her novels began to shift away from traditional narrative forms, delving into the characters’ psyches with the use of free indirect discourse and in later works, stream of consciousness.

These prolific years partly overlapped with her relationship with Vita Sackville-West, an aristocratic writer whom she met through the Bloomsbury Group. Not only was it an important romantic relationship in Woolf’s life, but it was a mutually beneficial friendship, contributing to the fruitful writing careers of both women. Sackville-West published commercially successful novels such as The Edwardians with the Hogarth Press, while Woolf wrote Orlando (1928), which was partly inspired by their relationship.

Initially envisioned as a satirical romp – an effort to move away from the weighty topics of her previous work – Orlando turned out to be much more. Couched in a mock-biographical shell, the novel tells the story of Orlando, beginning in the Elizabethan era and swiftly moving across centuries, with the titular main character changing genders midway through the novel. In some ways, the gender and age-defying Orlando represents Sackville-West, but the novel also takes inspiration from traditional biographical writing as well as the Renaissance poem ‘Orlando Furioso’. Moving beyond satire, Orlando cleverly probes concepts of gender through its androgynous main character, making it a uniquely modern work nearly a hundred years after its publication.

Turbulent times

After several years of prolific literary output, in the turbulent decade leading up to the Second World War, Woolf became increasingly politically involved, taking part in several anti-fascist committees, and supporting her husband’s work with the Labour Party. It was during this time that she wrote her polemical work Three Guineas (1938). In a way her writing returned to the roots of her paternal education, as she began to write works of biography, such as Flush (1933) and Roger Fry (1940).

As the Second World War began, the Woolfs were living in Holborn, where Woolf was working on her memoirs, ‘A Sketch of the Past’, and her final novel Between the Acts (1941). On 28 March 1941, after decades of struggle with her mental health, Woolf committed suicide by drowning herself in the River Ouse.

Although in popular culture Woolf is often remembered for the tragic end to her life, as well as the entangled love lives of the Bloomsbury Group, it is her sustained intellectual engagement with the movements of her time and her contributions to the canon of feminist writing that continues to engage her readers, cementing her place among the greats of English literature.

CHAPTER 1

He–for there could be no doubt of his sex, though the fashion of the time did something to disguise it–was in the act of slicing at the head of a Moor which swung from the rafters. It was the colour of an old football, and more or less the shape of one, save for the sunken cheeks and a strand or two of coarse, dry hair, like the hair on a cocoanut. Orlando’s father, or perhaps his grandfather, had struck it from the shoulders of a vast Pagan who had started up under the moon in the barbarian fields of Africa; and now it swung, gently, perpetually, in the breeze which never ceased blowing through the attic rooms of the gigantic house of the lord who had slain him.

Orlando’s fathers had ridden in fields of asphodel, and stony fields, and fields watered by strange rivers, and they had struck many heads of many colours off many shoulders, and brought them back to hang from the rafters. So too would Orlando, he vowed. But since he was sixteen only, and too young to ride with them in Africa or France, he would steal away from his mother and the peacocks in the garden and go to his attic room and there lunge and plunge and slice the air with his blade. Sometimes he cut the cord so that the skull bumped on the floor and he had to string it up again, fastening it with some chivalry almost out of reach so that his enemy grinned at him through shrunk, black lips triumphantly. The skull swung to and fro, for the house, at the top of which he lived, was so vast that there seemed trapped in it the wind itself, blowing this way, blowing that way, winter and summer. The green arras with the hunters on it moved perpetually. His fathers had been noble since they had been at all. They came out of the northern mists wearing coronets on their heads. Were not the bars of darkness in the room, and the yellow pools which chequered the floor, made by the sun falling through the stained glass of a vast coat of arms in the window? Orlando stood now in the midst of the yellow body of an heraldic leopard. When he put his hand on the window sill to push the window open, it was instantly coloured red, blue, and yellow like a butterfly’s wing. Thus, those who like symbols, and have a turn for the deciphering of them, might observe that though the shapely legs, the handsome body, and the well-set shoulders were all of them decorated with various tints of heraldic light, Orlando’s face, as he threw the window open, was lit solely by the sun itself. A more candid, sullen face it would be impossible to find. Happy the mother who bears, happier still the biographer who records the life of such a one! Never need she vex herself, nor he invoke the help of novelist or poet. From deed to deed, from glory to glory, from office to office he must go, his scribe following after, till they reach whatever seat it may be that is the height of their desire. Orlando, to look at, was cut out precisely for some such career. The red of the cheeks was covered with peach down; the down on the lips was only a little thicker than the down on the cheeks. The lips themselves were short and slightly drawn back over teeth of an exquisite and almond whiteness. Nothing disturbed the arrowy nose in its short, tense flight; the hair was dark, the ears small, and fitted closely to the head. But, alas, that these catalogues of youthful beauty cannot end without mentioning forehead and eyes. Alas, that people are seldom born devoid of all three; for directly we glance at Orlando standing by the window, we must admit that he had eyes like drenched violets, so large that the water seemed to have brimmed in them and widened them; and a brow like the swelling of a marble dome pressed between the two blank medallions which were his temples. Directly we glance at eyes and forehead, thus do we rhapsodize. Directly we glance at eyes and forehead, we have to admit a thousand disagreeables which it is the aim of every good biographer to ignore. Sights disturbed him, like that of his mother, a very beautiful lady in green walking out to feed the peacocks with Twitchett, her maid, behind her; sights exalted him–the birds and the trees; and made him in love with death–the evening sky, the homing rooks; and so, mounting up the spiral stairway into his brain–which was a roomy one–all these sights, and the garden sounds too, the hammer beating, the wood chopping, began that riot and confusion of the passions and emotions which every good biographer detests. But to continue–Orlando slowly drew in his head, sat down at the table, and, with the half-conscious air of one doing what they do every day of their lives at this hour, took out a writing book labelled Aethelbert: A Tragedy in Five Acts, and dipped an old stained goose quill in the ink.

Soon he had covered ten pages and more with poetry. He was fluent, evidently, but he was abstract. Vice, Crime, Misery were the personages of his drama; there were Kings and Queens of impossible territories; horrid plots confounded them; noble sentiments suffused them; there was never a word said as he himself would have said it, but all was turned with a fluency and sweetness which, considering his age–he was not yet seventeen–and that the sixteenth century had still some years of its course to run, were remarkable enough. At last, however, he came to a halt. He was describing, as all young poets are forever describing, nature, and in order to match the shade of green precisely he looked (and here he showed more audacity than most) at the thing itself, which happened to be a laurel bush growing beneath the window. After that, of course, he could write no more. Green in nature is one thing, green in literature another. Nature and letters seem to have a natural antipathy; bring them together and they tear each other to pieces. The shade of green Orlando now saw spoilt his rhyme and split his metre. Moreover, nature has tricks of her own. Once look out of a window at bees among flowers, at a yawning dog, at the sun setting, once think how many more suns shall I see set, etc. etc. (the thought is too well known to be worth writing out) and one drops the pen, takes one’s cloak, strides out of the room, and catches one’s foot on a painted chest as one does so. For Orlando was a trifle clumsy.

He was careful to avoid meeting anyone. There was Stubbs, the gardener, coming along the path. He hid behind a tree till he had passed. He let himself out at a little gate in the garden wall. He skirted all stables, kennels, breweries, carpenters’ shops, washhouses, places where they make tallow candles, kill oxen, forge horseshoes, stitch jerkins–for the house was a town ringing with men at work at their various crafts–and gained the ferny path leading uphill through the park unseen. There is perhaps a kinship among qualities; one draws another along with it; and the biographer should here call attention to the fact that this clumsiness is often mated with a love of solitude. Having stumbled over a chest, Orlando naturally loved solitary places, vast views, and to feel himself for ever and ever and ever alone.

So, after a long silence, I am alone, he breathed at last, opening his lips for the first time in this record. He had walked very quickly uphill through ferns and hawthorn bushes, startling deer and wild birds, to a place crowned by a single oak tree. It was very high, so high indeed that nineteen English counties could be seen beneath; and on clear days thirty or perhaps forty, if the weather was very fine. Sometimes one could see the English Channel, wave reiterating upon wave. Rivers could be seen and pleasure boats gliding on them; and galleons setting out to sea; and armadas with puffs of smoke from which came the dull thud of cannon firing; and forts on the coast; and castles among the meadows; and here a watch tower; and there a fortress; and again some vast mansion like that of Orlando’s father, massed like a town in the valley circled by walls. To the east there were the spires of London and the smoke of the city; and perhaps on the very sky line, when the wind was in the right quarter, the craggy top and serrated edges of Snowdon herself showed mountainous among the clouds. For a moment Orlando stood counting, gazing, recognizing. That was his father’s house; that his uncle’s. His aunt owned those three great turrets among the trees there. The heath was theirs and the forest; the pheasant and the deer, the fox, the badger, and the butterfly.

He sighed profoundly, and flung himself–there was a passion in his movements which deserves the word–on the earth at the foot of the oak tree. He loved, beneath all this summer transiency, to feel the earth’s spine beneath him; for such he took the hard root of the oak tree to be; or, for image followed image, it was the back of a great horse that he was riding, or the deck of a tumbling ship–it was anything indeed, so long as it was hard, for he felt the need of something which he could attach his floating heart to; the heart that tugged at his side; the heart that seemed filled with spiced and amorous gales every evening about this time when he walked out. To the oak tree he tied it and as he lay there, gradually the flutter in and about him stilled itself; the little leaves hung, the deer stopped; the pale summer clouds stayed; his limbs grew heavy on the ground; and he lay so still that by degrees the deer stepped nearer and the rooks wheeled round him and the swallows dipped and circled and the dragonflies shot past, as if all the fertility and amorous activity of a summer’s evening were woven web-like about his body.

After an hour or so–the sun was rapidly sinking, the white clouds had turned red, the hills were violet, the woods purple, the valleys black–a trumpet sounded. Orlando leapt to his feet. The shrill sound came from the valley. It came from a dark spot down there; a spot compact and mapped out; a maze; a town, yet girt about with walls; it came from the heart of his own great house in the valley, which, dark before, even as he looked and the single trumpet duplicated and reduplicated itself with other shriller sounds, lost its darkness and became pierced with lights. Some were small hurrying lights, as if servants dashed along corridors to answer summonses; others were high and lustrous lights, as if they burnt in empty banqueting halls made ready to receive guests who had not come; and others dipped and waved and sank and rose, as if held in the hands of troops of serving men, bending, kneeling, rising, receiving, guarding, and escorting with all dignity indoors a great Princess alighting from her chariot. Coaches turned and wheeled in the courtyard. Horses tossed their plumes. The Queen had come.

Orlando looked no more. He dashed downhill. He let himself in at a wicket gate. He tore up the winding staircase. He reached his room. He tossed his stockings to one side of the room, his jerkin to the other. He dipped his head. He scoured his hands. He pared his finger nails. With no more than six inches of looking glass and a pair of old candles to help him, he had thrust on crimson breeches, lace collar, waistcoat of taffeta, and shoes with rosettes on them as big as double dahlias in less than ten minutes by the stable clock. He was ready. He was flushed. He was excited. But he was terribly late.

By short cuts known to him, he made his way now through the vast congeries of rooms and staircases to the banqueting hall, five acres distant on the other side of the house. But halfway there, in the back quarters where the servants lived, he stopped. The door of Mrs. Stewkley’s sitting room stood open–she was gone, doubtless, with all her keys to wait upon her mistress. But there, sitting at the servant’s dinner table with a tankard beside him and paper in front of him, sat a rather fat, shabby man, whose ruff was a thought dirty, and whose clothes were of hodden brown. He held a pen in his hand, but he was not writing. He seemed in the act of rolling some thought up and down, to and fro in his mind till it gathered shape or momentum to his liking. His eyes, globed and clouded like some green stone of curious texture, were fixed. He did not see Orlando. For all his hurry, Orlando stopped dead. Was this a poet? Was he writing poetry? Tell me, he wanted to say, everything in the whole world–for he had the wildest, most absurd, extravagant ideas about poets and poetry–but how speak to a man who does not see you? who sees ogres, satyrs, perhaps the depths of the sea instead? So Orlando stood gazing while the man turned his pen in his fingers, this way and that way; and gazed and mused; and then, very quickly, wrote half-a-dozen lines and looked up. Whereupon Orlando, overcome with shyness, darted off and reached the banqueting hall only just in time to sink upon his knees and, hanging his head in confusion, to offer a bowl of rose water to the great Queen herself.

Such was his shyness that he saw no more of her than her ringed hands in water; but it was enough. It was a memorable hand; a thin hand with long fingers always curling as if round orb or sceptre; a nervous, crabbed, sickly hand; a commanding hand too; a hand that had only to raise itself for a head to fall; a hand, he guessed, attached to an old body that smelt like a cupboard in which furs are kept in camphor; which body was yet caparisoned in all sorts of brocades and gems; and held itself very upright though perhaps in pain from sciatica; and never flinched though strung together by a thousand fears; and the Queen’s eyes were light yellow. All this he felt as the great rings flashed in the water and then something pressed his hair–which, perhaps, accounts for his seeing nothing more likely to be of use to a historian. And in truth, his mind was such a welter of opposites–of the night and the blazing candles, of the shabby poet and the great Queen, of silent fields and the clatter of serving men–that he could see nothing; or only a hand.

By the same showing, the Queen herself can have seen only a head. But if it is possible from a hand to deduce a body, informed with all the attributes of a great Queen, her crabbedness, courage, frailty, and terror, surely a head can be as fertile, looked down upon from a chair of state by a lady whose eyes were always, if the waxworks at the Abbey are to be trusted, wide open. The long, curled hair, the dark head bent so reverently, so innocently before her, implied a pair of the finest legs that a young nobleman has ever stood upright upon; and violet eyes; and a heart of gold; and loyalty and manly charm–all qualities which the old woman loved the more the more they failed her. For she was growing old and worn and bent before her time. The sound of cannon was always in her ears. She saw always the glistening poison drop and the long stiletto. As she sat at table she listened; she heard the guns in the Channel; she dreaded–was that a curse, was that a whisper? Innocence, simplicity, were all the more dear to her for the dark background she set them against. And it was that same night, so tradition has it, when Orlando was sound asleep, that she made over formally, putting her hand and seal finally to the parchment, the gift of the great monastic house that had been the Archbishop’s and then the King’s to Orlando’s father.

Orlando slept all night in ignorance. He had been kissed by a queen without knowing it. And perhaps, for women’s hearts

Reviews for Orlando

[dinadansfriend · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

A surreal novel, unmoored from conventional time framework, centred on an immortal, sometimes male and sometimes female. Woolf was a highly skilled writer, and though the work is sometimes entertaining, overall, I found this exercise dull.

[antao-3 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

If you're into stuff like this, you can read the full review.Biological Constructs: "Orlando" by Virginia Woolf(Original Review, 2002-06-18)I’m probably in a minority, but I find Woolf hugely overrated. A snob in the way that Wilde was a snob before her, sucking up to the wealthy and titled and, like Wilde, happy to be unfaithful if it ingratiated her with the gentry. People go on about ‘a room of one’s own’ but have they read the whole piece? She thought only a few superior personages should be allowed to write, and then only for a select audience.

[anesamiller · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

An Elizabethan nobleman is reincarnated as a Victorian lady via an ambassador to Turkey and a hospitable gypsy tribe. Whimsy to the nth degree! This is not what I was expecting from the author of such a tragedy as THE VOYAGE OUT, but Woolf’s remarkably convoluted yet elegant syntax was sufficient to keep me entranced. I laughed out loud at the scene of Lady Orlando cheating at a game of “Fly loo.”

Elizabeth Bowen comments in the Afterword to the edition I read that Virginia was the idol of those who believed art exists for “sublimating personality into poetry”—for escaping from the personal, as I understand her. Bowen says these devotees were dismayed to find in ORLANDO a “prank [or] personal joke”—i.e., the author’s evocation of her own special friendship with Vita Sackville-West. Contrary to the aesthetes Bowen cites, I found that the aura of fantasy became so dense in the book’s latter pages it made me wonder if this might be a sublimation of the symptoms of mental illness. What more salutary use might one make of such affliction that to channel it into a book that makes readers laugh?

[amelish · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I'm somewhat embarrassed to say that I didn't really feel this book until I saw the movie (with Tilda Swinton). Not my favorite V. Woolf, but possibly more interesting.

[k8_not_kate · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

While the scope and idea of this novel was and is exciting, I felt it lacked something. Orlando's adventures felt more like aimless (and not-quite-interesting) wanderings than an exciting odyssey. After finishing the book and feeling a little like I had wasted my time, I read some background on it that explained that the biography was a kind of tribute to Woolf's androgynous lover, Vita Sackville-West. Knowing that gives the novel a little more meaning, but doesn't make it all that much more interesting. As other reviewers have noted, the story up to the point where Orlando leaves London for Constantinople is much more exciting than the rest and is what most of my three stars a owed to.

[nickelini · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Review of the Annotated Edition of Orlando, published by Harvest Books Harcourt, Inc. Although the movie version of this book is one of my favourites, and although I've read a decent amount of Virginia Woolf, I was rather dubious about this book. It seemed very odd compared to her other writing. And it is . . . but it's wonderfully odd. This may be my favourite of all her novels.What really made this book for me was all the magic realism elements. I loved her descriptions of Orlando viewing all of England from his/her oak tree, including "the wild tides that swirl about the Hebrides". The whole Great Frost section was exceptionally well done, and I especially loved the description of the porpoise frozen in suspended animation in the icy Thames, or the Norwich countrywoman who turned visibly to powder by the cold while she crossed the road. I could go on and on . . .As for the annotations, as with the other annotated Woolf books published by Harvest Harcourt, I have mixed thoughts. Some of the annotations were very helpful. However, I thought they missed some things in the text that I would have appreciated a note on, and there were many notes that I thought unnecessary.Recommended for:I want to say "everyone," but alas, Virginia Woolf is not everyone's cup of tea.

[rmckeown_9 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

In a graduate class on Victorian Literature at Baylor, we read most of Woolf’s works. I had come to the class having only read Mrs. Dalloway, which I greatly enjoyed. Orlando immediately became another favorite of her novels. On October 5, 1927, Virginia Woolf began writing a story she had worked through her mind for months. Now Woolf, an early modernist influenced by James Joyce, is most certainly an acquired taste. The novel, Orlando, is, as she wrote, a fictional “biography beginning in the year 1500 & continuing until the present day” (Nissley, A Reader’s Book of Days 316). I decided to revisit this unusual novel, but a rather peculiar thing happened to me. I found the story a tough read, and as the novel progressed, I found it harder and harder to continue. For once a novel did not stay with me, and I can say I did not enjoy the read at all.The story begins with Orlando, a handsome young man, heir of titles and lands dating back to William the Conquerer. He becomes a favorite of Queen Bess. As Woolf writes, “For the old woman loved him. And the Queen, who knew a man when she saw one, though not, it is said, in the usual way, plotted for him a splendid ambitious career. Lands were given him, houses assigned him. He was to be the son of her old age; the limb of her infirmity; the oak tree on which she leant her degradation. She croaked out these promises and strange domineering tendernesses (they were at Richmond now) sitting bolt upright in her stiff brocades by the fire which, however high they piled it, never kept her warm” (9).Woolf, an ardent feminist, details the habits and peculiarities of men, and then turns her attentions to the onerous life of women with all the strictures placed upon them in regard to marriage, ownership of property, and public, as well as private, activities. She also comments on Elizabethan, Enlightenment, Victorian, and 20th century attitudes towards women.Woolf writes, “crime and poverty had none of the attraction for the Elizabethans that they have for us. They had none of our modern shame of book learning; none of our belief that to be born the son of a butcher is a blessing and to be unable to read a virtue; no fancy that what we call ‘life’ and ‘reality are somehow connected with ignorance and brutality; nor, indeed any equivalent for these two words at all” (13). Yes, these lines found themselves on paper in her distinctive purple ink in 1927.Orlando constantly struggles with loneliness and isolation concomitant with his position among the nobility. As he rises to the title of Duke, he begins to detest the hypocrisy of the upper class and the shallow gossip of those who pretend to intellectualism. Orlando befriends, Alexander Pope, Joseph Addison, and John Dryden attends gatherings with Swift, Johnson, and Boswell. Finally, an invitation is extended to Pope and Addison to her home, and there, they have tea and conversations worthy of those eminent men.Half way through Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, the well-foxed old paperback began to fall apart, as if trying to end its own misery. But I have ordered a new copy, with annotations, and I will try again soon. So, I find myself perplexed. Do I dare reread Mrs. Dalloway? I think not. I will hold that one in my memory. Based on my read in 1995, or thereabouts, 5 stars--Chiron, 9/14/14

[tgamble54 · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

Not what I like about VW's writing. Didn't finish.

[nicolehc_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

It's crazy. In a good way.

[thedivineoomba · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I read this one not knowing exactly what it was about - and I find a very funny, well written, Satire-ish book on what it means to be man or a woman in the British England. First - this is a book you have to read carefully. Orlando doesn't age like a regular person, so years pass, societal beliefs, and general culture change in a blink of an eye. But, it is written in an easy style, with a light touch that makes it a very accessible book. It's a completely different style than Virginia Woolf's other books (Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, etc.)Ms. Woolf has a way of writing that manages to capture the absurdity of culture's expectation of both being Male and being Female. Orlando, being both at different times, shows just how limiting both are sexes are. Its also a critique of Victorian England and how stifling it is to women.

[grunin_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

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.

[jimmychanga · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I finished Orlando a couple of days ago. It was not really my thing. I understand that it started as a joke, but (even though I sorta know what she was making fun of) it just wasn't funny to me. I'm sure Virginia Woolf had a hoot writing it, though, so I'm happy for her.

Towards the middle, the "biographer's" voice started sounding very much like the "lecturer's" voice in A Room of One's Own. In fact, I was surprised at the similarity in tonality between the two works. It had that same quality of breaking the third wall, of creating a make-believe scenario that was obviously not true (i.e. written to illustrate a point), and also of that slightly didactic "here's what I want to say on the topic of the sexes" which I didn't mind as much in AROOO since it was an essay afterall.

Anyway, if you (like me) loved Mrs. Dalloway and her other Dalloway-like works, then don't read this expecting more of the same. You may love it or you may hate it. If you hated Mrs. Dalloway and her other Dalloway-like works, then definitely give this a chance. This may be your thing.

[gorgeousglenda · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Virginia W. said this was her throwaway book, not to be taken seriously and not to trouble herself too much over. Sort of her "beach" read. I loved it almost more than her serious works of art. Woolfe isn't known much for the fantastical or the humourous, but Orlando has these things. A fascinating experiment in time and gender.

[fleurdiabolique · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

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.

[helenliz_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I'm not sure what to make of this. As a novel, far too many things are left hanging or unexplained. How come Orlando can live for 400 years and be 36 being just one... As a thought provoking piece of writing, however, it asks a lot of questions that are not uncontroversial now, so goodness only knows what it was like when it was published. On the face of it, Orlando is a biography of the titular character, an Elizabethan Nobleman who has too much time on his hands and a penchant for poetry. He goes to Constantinople as ambassador and comes back transformed into a woman. From that point, the love of literature persists, although the adjustment to life as a woman takes some time. The questions raised are about who we are, the face we present to the world. Orlando starts as a man, ends as a woman, and so has a lot of adjusting to do, in terms of what is expected of her now in her thought, speech, dress and behaviour. Why do we expect, even now, women and men to act differently in the same situations? Then there are questions about conformity, Orlando feels obliged to conform to the times she lives in, but how to do that while remaining true to herself. Some people are of their time, others appear to be ahead or living in the past. They're all equally valuable, should they conform and change their thinking to accommodate their times? There's a lot of what might be described as the thought police

[isabelx_21 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

What with the crowd, what with the Duke, what with the jewel, she drove home in the vilest temper imaginable. Was it impossible then to go for a walk without being half-suffocated, presented with a toad set in emeralds, and asked in marriage by an Archduke?Orlando is written in the form of a biography rather than a novel, with Virginia Woolf as the very present biographer, discussing her choice of words and the biographer's role, while relating the life of her protean and strangely long-lived subject.I won this book in a competition on the BBCi Arts web-site in 2002. I have been putting off reading it because, out of Virginia Woolf's novels I've only read "Mrs Dalloway" and part of "To the Lighthouse" and struggled with both. I did however enjoy the film version of "Orlando" starring Tilda Swinton, so when I gave myself a 'read it or get rid of it' ultimatum, I decided to give it a go and surprised myself by enjoying it quite a lot!

[crazybatcow · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Another classic I had to read for a research project. And I liked it even less than I thought I would. I have no idea why the "experts" rave about this so much... as a lesbian love letter to someone "in the know" (i.e. they have a clue what Woolf was going on about) maybe it is okay. But as a story?? not so much... there is no plot and no suspense... Basically it is a biography of a woman who pretends to be a man so she can have sex with women (and some transgender theorists claim she was transgendered but I didn't see this, I just saw a lesbian trying to live as a man in a world that didn't allow lesbians) and writes page after page about their clothing, their culture, their houses, their roads, their scenery.... ad nauseam.Again, I tried to read this in text form but the paragraphs are very very long and it was hard to keep my place without my eyes glazing over in boredom, so I got it in audio... which was better, only because my eyes no longer hurt.

[hbw_2 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is an odd book by any stretch of the imagination.

[rebeccler · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

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.

[snakeshands · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Loads of fun, effortless prose, and one hell of a love note. Not your usual Woolf!

[saraprindiville · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

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.

[scolgo · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Surreal and eclectic. As a piece of allegory, this was an interesting book. A bit long-winded in places but still mostly entertaining.

[auntieclio · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Orlando is odd, and I can't quite put my finger on why I think it's odd. It's not the gender bending, although the "and one day Orlando woke up and was a woman" was definitely odd. Finding that one of her lovers had been pursuing her in drag was not so odd as puzzling. The three centuries Orlando lives in this tale is a little odd. I understand the parody of biography Woolf is writing, and the pokes she takes at rigid cultural mores which insist women must behave in certain ways and are not allowed to have sexual interest in other women. I just found the whole book odd, and a bit of a slog and finished it because I've never read Virginia Woolf before and felt I owed it to myself to finish.

[delightedlibrarian · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

Possibly one of the strangest novels I've ever read. So... flexible (for lack of a better term) in time and gender, not to mention the legality of identity. I finished it thinking how the story worked which was amazing because logically it doesn't work what so ever.

[jbd1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A lovely, lively meditation on biography, history, reading, human nature and sexuality. Amusing, witty, and thought-provoking all at once. Highly recommended.

[lyndatrue · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

One of Virginia Woolf's best works, it presents the impossible as believable, and is one of the very few novels I've ever seen taken to the screen that kept the improbable becoming possible without insult to the intellect, and with respect for the beauty.

[deebee1_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

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.

[andreablythe · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Woolf presents a satirical biography of Orlando, a young man who lives for over 300 years and has a mysterious transformation into being a women along the way. It's never clear how it is Orlando is able to gain this immortality (perhaps his obsession with thought, words, poetry?) or how it is that Orlando becomes a woman, which worked for the way the story unfolded. I really wanted to be charmed by this, as I had been with other books by Woolf, but whereas the vibrancy of language and compactness of the stories in both To the Lighthouse and Mrs. Dalloway delighted me, Orlando failed to hold my attention. Also, I was deeply bothered the racism within the book, particularly the opening scene (in which Orlando toys with the head of a nameless dead Moor), but also by the Orientalism in the scenes in Turkey and the portrayal of the "gipsies." The fact that the story was "of it's time" is not enough to shake the unsettled feeling from me.

[gbill_7 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

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…”

[margaretfield · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

about a person that changes genders and lives over several centuries