Orlando: A Biography

By Virginia Woolf

A poet lives for more than three centuries, becomes a woman, and ages only twenty years in this classic fantastical work by the author of Mrs. Dalloway.

Orlando begins their story as a melancholy sixteen-year-old nobleman and poet who spends their days in the court of Queen Elizabeth I, who takes a shine to them. Love, passion, and heartbreak guide Orlando’s life through two more kings. In their thirties, Orlando becomes an ambassador to Turkey and there undergoes an astonishing gender transformation.

Eventually returning to their native England, Orlando embarks on a journey of learning, love, and fulfillment. They cross paths with great literary minds from English history and eventually settles down after three centuries. The story comes to a close in the year 1928 with Orlando now a thirty-six-year-old married woman and published poet.

Cited as an “exuberant romp through history,” Orlando was first originally in 1928. This humorous fictional biography was inspired by the family history of poet and novelist Vita Sackville-West. Sackville-West’s son referred to the novel as “the longest and most charming love letter in literature.”

“A fantasy, impossible but delicious . . . An exuberance of life and wit.” —The Times Literary Supplement

“Once more Mrs. Woolf has broken with tradition and convention and has set out to explore still another fourth dimension of writing. . . . It is something of a question whether the tendency of contemporary novelists to become more and more introspective can profitably be carried much further. If it is to continue, however, Mrs. Woolf has pointed out the direction in which it must develop.” —The New York Times

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Media
• Release date: Jan 1, 2024
• ISBN: 9781504081429

Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf was an English novelist, essayist, short story writer, publisher, critic and member of the Bloomsbury group, as well as being regarded as both a hugely significant modernist and feminist figure. Her most famous works include Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse and A Room of One’s Own.

Book preview

PREFACE

Many friends have helped me in writing this hook. Some are dead and so illustrious that I scarcely dare name them, yet no one can read or write without being perpetually in the debt of Defoe, Sir Thomas Browne, Sterne, Sir Walter Scott, Lord Macaulay, Emily Bronte, De Quincey, and Walter Pater,—to name the first that come to mind. Others are alive, and though perhaps as illustrious in their own way, are less formidable for that very reason. I am specially indebted to Mr. C.P. Sanger, without whose knowledge of the law of real property this book could never have been written. Mr. Sydney-Turner’s wide and peculiar erudition has saved me, I hope, some lamentable blunders. I have had the advantage—how great I alone can estimate—of Mr. Arthur Waley’s knowledge of Chinese. Madame Lopokova (Mrs. J.M. Keynes) has been at hand to correct my Russian. To the unrivalled sympathy and imagination of Mr. Roger Fry I owe whatever understanding of the art of painting I may possess. I have, I hope, profited in another department by the singularly penetrating, if severe, criticism of my nephew Mr. Julian Bell. Miss M.K. Snowdon’s indefatigable researches in the archives of Harrogate and Cheltenham were none the less arduous for being vain. Other friends have helped me in ways too various to specify. I must content myself with naming Mr. Angus Davidson; Mrs. Cartwright; Miss Janet Case; Lord Berners (whose knowledge of Elizabethan music has proved invaluable); Mr. Francis Birrell; my brother, Dr Adrian Stephen; Mr. F.L. Lucas; Mr. and Mrs. Desmond Maccarthy; that most inspiriting of critics, my brother-in-law, Mr. Clive Bell; Mr. G.H. Rylands; Lady Colefax; Miss Nellie Boxall; Mr. J.M. Keynes; Mr. Hugh Walpole; Miss Violet Dickinson; the Hon. Edward Sackville West; Mr. and Mrs. St. John Hutchinson; Mr. Duncan Grant; Mr. and Mrs. Stephen Tomlin; Mr. and Lady Ottoline Morrell; my mother-in-law, Mrs. Sydney Woolf; Mr. Osbert Sitwell; Madame Jacques Raverat; Colonel Cory Bell; Miss Valerie Taylor; Mr. J.T. Sheppard; Mr. and Mrs. T.S. Eliot; Miss Ethel Sands; Miss Nan Hudson; my nephew Mr. Quentin Bell (an old and valued collaborator in fiction); Mr. Raymond Mortimer; Lady Gerald Wellesley; Mr. Lytton Strachey; the Viscountess Cecil; Miss Hope Mirrlees; Mr. E.M. Forster; the Hon. Harold Nicolson; and my sister, Vanessa Bell—but the list threatens to grow too long and is already far too distinguished. For while it rouses in me memories of the pleasantest kind it will inevitably wake expectations in the reader which the book itself can only disappoint. Therefore I will conclude by thanking the officials of the British Museum and Record Office for their wonted courtesy; my niece Miss Angelica Bell, for a service which none but she could have rendered; and my husband for the patience with which he has invariably helped my researches and for the profound historical knowledge to which these pages owe whatever degree of accuracy they may attain. Finally, I would thank, had I not lost his name and address, a gentleman in America, who has generously and gratuitously corrected the punctuation, the botany, the entomology, the geography, and the chronology of previous works of mine and will, I hope, not spare his services on the present occasion.

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 for ever 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 horse-shoes, 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 half-way 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 are intricate, it was his ignorance and the start he gave when her lips touched him that kept the memory of her young cousin (for they had blood in common) green in her mind. At any rate, two years of this quiet country life had not passed, and Orlando had written no more perhaps than twenty tragedies and a dozen histories and a score of sonnets when a message came that he was to attend the Queen at Whitehall.

‘Here,’ she said, watching him advance down the long gallery towards her, ‘comes my innocent!’ (There was a serenity about him always which had the look of innocence when, technically, the word was no longer applicable.)

‘Come!’ she said. She was sitting bolt upright beside the fire. And she held him a foot’s pace from her and looked him up and down. Was she matching her speculations the other night with the truth now visible? Did she find her guesses justified? Eyes, mouth, nose, breast, hips, hands—she ran them over; her lips twitched visibly as she looked; but when she saw his legs she laughed out loud. He was the very image of a noble gentleman. But inwardly? She flashed her yellow hawk’s eyes upon him as if she would pierce his soul. The young man withstood her gaze blushing only a damask rose as became him. Strength, grace, romance, folly, poetry, youth—she read him like a page. Instantly she plucked a ring from her finger (the joint was swollen rather) and as she fitted it to his, named him her Treasurer and Steward; next hung about him chains of office; and bidding him bend his knee, tied round it at the slenderest part the jewelled order of the Garter. Nothing after that was denied him. When she drove in state he rode at her carriage door. She sent him to Scotland on a sad embassy to the unhappy Queen. He was about to sail for the Polish wars when she recalled him. For how could she bear to think of that tender flesh torn and that curly head rolled in the dust? She kept him with her. At the height of her triumph when the guns were booming at the Tower and the air was thick enough with gunpowder to make one sneeze and the huzzas of the people rang beneath the windows, she pulled him down among the cushions where her women had laid her (she was so worn and old) and made him bury his face in that astonishing composition—she had not changed her dress for a month—which smelt for all the world, he thought, recalling his boyish memory, like some old cabinet at home where his mother’s furs were stored. He rose, half suffocated from the embrace. ‘This,’ she breathed, ‘is my victory!’—even as a rocket roared up and dyed her cheeks scarlet.

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.

Meanwhile, the long winter months drew on. Every tree in the Park was lined with frost. The river ran sluggishly. One day when the snow was on the ground and the dark panelled rooms were full of

Reviews for Orlando

[jonbrammer-788089 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

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.

[gpower61 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Virginia Woolf described Orlando as ‘a writer’s holiday’ and you can tell she had fun writing it. It fizzes with playfully transgressive energy and subversive wit. The narrative voice, intoxicated and intoxicating, is deliciously insouciant and deliriously exuberant. It is frequently laugh-out-loud funny.Orlando is (quite apart from all the other things it is or might be): a love letter to Vita Sackville-West and fantastical reimagining of her life and family history; the first trans novel in the English language; a sensuous and liberating dance to the music of historic and personal time; a ludic fusion of the factual and fictional which initiates post-modernism; an elegant demolition of Victorian patriarchal history and biography; a joyous celebration of all the people you are, have been and are yet to be. And it’s serious fun; the most fun you can have with your gender defining clothes on.Are you afraid of Virginia Woolf? If so, meet Orlando: their polymorphous charm might just cure you of your phobia.

[funstm · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

I didn't get it.

[ghost_boy-691444 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is what I call Woolf's out of place novel because it's not at all like her other books. For one she never wrote fantasies and two she rarely wrote comedies. She wrote outside of her element. Yet she uses her common themes such as feminism and bisexuality. What I find the most astounding in this is that it's both fiction and non-fiction at the same time. Orlando was a real persona and at the same time he/she was not a real person. This also open my eyes to just let things happen as they are. If you can't deal with the fact a man turns into a woman without any explanation except for a chapter change, maybe you don't want to read this book. I would not however suggest this book to new reader of Woolf. This will confuse you even more of her writing style. Like I said before this novel is different then her other works in the sense it meta-fictional rather then just regular fiction. If you want my word though, this is one of my favorite books of all time. I love Mrs. Dalloway the best for Woolf, but this one is close to my liking.

[akblanchard_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

In this strange book, fantastically privileged protagonist Orlando sails through time periods and genders, starting out as a male during the Renaissance and ending up as a female during the early twentieth century. There are some witty remarks about the British literary canon (when was the last time you had a laugh at Alexander Pope's expense?), and sharp observations about gender roles, but overall, this book is an achievement to be admired rather than a work to be loved.

[kristelh_15 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

A satire on gender. This book was written in 1928 and covers 300 years but Orlando hardly ages and changes from man to woman. It is biography of Ms Woolf's poet friend/lover Vita Sackville-West, but it is also fictionalized and it is satirical.

[marse_4 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

"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.

[paulmorriss · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Some classics are too strange for me, but I managed to hang on for this one.

[bookworm12_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I can't believe this book was published in 1928, almost 100 years ago! It is a fascinating classic, particularly in its views on gender and the roles assigned to women and men in our society. It feels very modern. I felt like it worked more as a discussion of that theme than as a fictional biography of Orlando. I cared more about those thoughts than about how Orlando's life progressed. “As long as she thinks of a man, nobody objects to a woman thinking.”“No passion is stronger in the breast of a man than the desire to make others believe as he believes. Nothing so cuts at the root of his happiness and fills him with rage as the sense that another rates low what he prizes high.”“By the truth we are undone. Life is a dream. 'Tis the waking that kills us. He who robs us of our dreams robs us of our life.”

[elenaj-147457 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I laughed out loud a lot more than I expected. Unusually, I thoroughly enjoyed this book without particularly liking any of the characters in it -- perhaps because the narrator was such a strong (and delightful) presence. For me, it was all about the metacommentary.

[annbury_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is a complex classic, genre bending as well as gender bending. What I love most about it, however, isn't the interplay between forms and voices, or the entrancing plot. It's the language, the sheer flow of beautiful English. For such an intellectual writer Woolf triumphs here in vividly physical imagery, in prose the trembles into poetry, in wit and cadence and so many instances of le mot juste. Loved it when I was 15, still love it at 75. It has certainly aged better than I have!

[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.

[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.

[margaretfield · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

about a person that changes genders and lives over several centuries

[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.

[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.

[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.

[toddsherman · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

"A poet is Atlantic and lion in one. While one drowns us the other gnaws us. If we survive the teeth, we succumb to the waves. A man who can destroy illusions is both beast and flood. Illusions are to the soul what atmosphere is to the earth."—Orlando by Virginia WoolfParenthetical with pleonastic dalliances, Woolf’s “Orlando” was a joy to read aloud. Gender-bending throughout the ages, breaking the fourth wall of literature as well as sexual taboos, forging a weapon of fiction that was usually beaten on the anvil by calloused, masculine hands. Her work may not always resonate with me, but the echoes off the walls sure sound nice. A novel about a poet would normally push me to the wall, find a stud (or mare) and pound my brow flat with repeated blows. Writing about a writer is as dirty a trick as reading your own poetry in public, measuring one’s pink parsnip with a tape measure in a late night dick pic, writing yourself into a screenplay as the main character or revving your engine at a stoplight while scrolling through insipid social media. Fortunately, this classic was more about the interplay of sex in literature and whose voice will be paramount amongst the crashing icebergs in a freshly thawed river. And, zounds! Gerunds abound! Well, at least in the second sentence of this reviewnotreview of a manwomanman tripping over three hundred years. It’s all I’ve got time for. My own shit to scrawl. In a quarter of the time (if I’m lucky). And so:“Over the obscure man is poured the merciful suffusion of darkness. None knows where he goes or comes. He may seek the truth and speak it; he alone is free; he alone is truthful; he alone is at peace.”

[tgamble54 · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

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

[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

[ffortsa · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Everyone in our book circle agreed that this was a funny book, not what you would expect from Woolf, but it is after all a gloss on Vita Sackville-West and Woolf's complicated relationship with her. What is impressive: Well, for one, the brilliant evocation of such different times across the four and a half centuries of Orlando's existence. As Karenmarie mentioned, the evocation of a frozen Thames and the celebrations on the ice, and then the breakup and disaster that came after, are beautifully realized. And this continues through the coming times, in England and in Constantinople and in the gypsy camp. Then there are the changing attitudes toward women in society that Orlando lives through and adjusts to. And there are the sly sideswipes and writers past and present, which in some cases were laugh-out-loud funny.My edition had notes in the back to help readers who don't know the historical references. Sometimes they were a bit overdone, but often helpful.Sometimes it feels a bit like an adult fairy tale, or a fantasy adventure. Sackville-West's life has something to do with that, but to read this only as a roman-a-clef would do it an injustice. So much daring in Woolf's time and before had to do with breaking conventions that deserved to be broken, it's hardly avoidable to see this as a social commentary as well as a romp.

[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.

[brokentune · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

"Are we so made that we have to take death in small doses daily or we could not go on with the business of living? And then what strange powers are these that penetrate our most secret ways and change our most treasured possessions without our willing it ? Had Orlando, worn out by the extremity of his suffering, died for a week, and then come to life again? And if so, of what nature is death and of what nature life? Having waited well over half an hour for an answer to these questions, and none coming, let us get on with the story."

What a ride! Virginia Woolf and I don't often get on. At all. I usually despair over her stream-of-consciousness style of writing and her characters. So, I approached Orlando with some trepidation. And what happens? Woolf pulls this masterpiece of a romp out of the hat which shows not only that she was a very clever writer but that she also had a delicious sense of humor.

Of course, it may be that that side of hers does only show in Orlando because it is a mock biography of and a tribute to Vita Sackville-West. One review I read even described the book as one of the most marvelous of love letters ever written - though both Virginia and Vita might have disagreed.

According to Nigel Nicolson, both Vita and Virginia denied rumors spread by Vita's mother that their liaison was a serious one:
"She told me that everything was true except the part about Virginia endangering their marriage, but none of it mattered a hoot because the love they bore each other was so powerful that it could withstand anything. ‘My diary entry for Sunday, 28 May, three weeks later, reads: Virginia and Leonard came to lunch . Virginia looking well and happy after her Italian trip. She listened to the whole story of my visit to Brighton with her head bowed. Then she said: “The old woman ought to be shot”."
(Nigel Nicolson - Portrait Of A Marriage: Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson)

Apart from the biographical aspect of Orlando being the fictionalised account of Vita's life, the book also amazes in that it dares to address the issues of identity and gender-bending or rather gender-switching - making it one of the most outspoken works of literature of its time to criticise a society that would condemn people to distinct roles based on their gender.

"And she fell to thinking what an odd pass we have come to when all a woman’s beauty has to be kept covered lest a sailor may fall from a mast-head. ‘A pox on them!’ she said, realizing for the first time what, in other circumstances, she would have been taught as a child, that is to say, the sacred responsibilities of womanhood."

Of course there are many other topics that Woolf takes up in Orlando, such as the nature of time, the vanity of poets, the nostalgia for things in the past which blinds us from an appreciation of the present, etc. but I have to admit that most of my admiration for Orlando is based on how Woolf reflects some of Vita's convictions in her fictionalised account and how to the point Orlando seems as a character who is at home in his/her identity.
Having read Nigel Nicolson's biography of Vita, his mother, at the same time asOrlando, it was delightful to see the links between the two accounts of someone who possessed a rather unconventional outlook for her time:

"I hold the conviction that as centuries go on, and the sexes become more nearly merged on account of their increasing resemblances, I hold the conviction that such connections will to a very large extent cease to be regarded as merely unnatural, and will be understood far better, at least in their intellectual if not in their physical aspect. (Such is already the case in Russia.) I believe that then the psychology of people like myself will be a matter of interest, and I believe it will be recognized that many more people of my type do exist than under the present-day system of hypocrisy is commonly admitted."
(Nigel Nicolson - Portrait Of A Marriage: Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson)

[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.

[aine.fin · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I struggled with this. I always expect to love Virginia Woolf's novels but the stream of consciousness style is a bit of a chore for me, ashamed as I am to admit it. There were a lot of in-jokes in this and I felt a very strong sense of nudging or smirking from the author, which I tired of. It seems like she wrote it for her inner circle and I consequently felt excluded from full enjoyment of it. That said, it is a cleverly crafted farce with exploration of gender roles which would have been ground-breaking at the time.

[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…”

[colereadsbooks · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

'The longest and most charming love letter in literature.’Virginia Woolf’s Orlando is the well known story an English Nobleman who works for the Queen in Elizabethan times. He has his heart broken by a Russian princess, and so he decides to leave the country. He becomes an ambassador for England in the city of Constantinople. During a fight in Constantinople, Orlando falls into a deep sleep, awakening days later as a woman. The novel then returns to England, where Orlando must take her place as an English woman in 19th century society.I'm not entirely sure this book was for me. The more I reflect on reading it, the more I'm not entirely sure I enjoyed it. I have only read one other book by Virginia Woolf and that was Mrs Dalloway, and that too gives me that same sense of “what did I just read?” I guess my feelings are partly due to Woolf’s stream of consciousness style. It’s very quick and I sometimes felt lost, like I was reading pages and pages and wasn’t entirely sure what the point was. I put this book down so many times and it took me a good while to finish it.That being said, I still think Orlando is a pretty interesting work, and I much prefer it to Mrs Dalloway. Orlando has a lot to say about women and the way women are treated. The story is written as a love letter to Vita Sackville-West, a woman Virginia Woolf had an affair with. It shows the passion of the Elizabethan age as well as both resenting and craving the idea of love.It is written in a very experimental style, it has a biographical feel to it, and I liked the elements in which the narrator stepped in to say a few words. It was full of wit and humour, as well as telling a very tender love story. It has very beautiful writing and imagery, but I still found it a very strange book to read.There is also a rather interesting film adaptation with Tilda Swinton, and I have to say it does a pretty great job of converting the book to the screen. While this book may not have been entirely for me, I think it’s a really important piece of literature. It discusses a lot about writing and why people choose to write, and overall is an immensely influential piece of writing.

[japaul22 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This book was so much fun. The whole time I was reading it, I felt like I could picture Virginia Woolf with an amused smile on her face, half making fun of herself and half making fun of her wider circle of friends. Orlando is the biography of Orlando who starts out as a young man living in the Elizabethan era of the 1500s and ends the book as a 36 year old woman in 1928. Along the way he/she has many life experiences, travels, and forays into writing. It's hard to say what this book is actually "about", but it's fun to read, amusing, and clever in the best senses of all of those words. Woolf makes no apologies or explanations for Orlando's sex change or longevity. I was expecting all of this to be confusing and shrouded in mystery, but Woolf just clearly lays out the events and expects the reader to go along. I loved it. I'd recommend reading some of Woolf's other works first or you might not get the lighter, more playful tone that she uses in this novel.

[ursula_2 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Woolf takes on the role of "biographer" to Orlando, who starts out as a young man in Elizabethan England. At a point in the book when he is about thirty years old, some magic occurs and he becomes a woman. He is the same person as before, just now in skirts and a different place in society. The change gives plenty of room for commentary on society and typical attitudes to and about women. This is pretty much what I expected, but I also found out something I didn't expect at all: Virginia Woolf had a sense of humor.Many parts of this book are funny. Quotably funny, although Woolf does love a sentence that runs on (she actually even pokes fun at that at one point!). She has humorous things to say about men, women, the relationships between them, writing, writers, society, politics, you name it. I was convinced I was going to love this book unabashedly, and then it inexplicably bogs down about two-thirds of the way through it. By then Orlando is living in the modern age (1920s). The immortality, unlike the gender transformation, has never been explained at all, by the way. I don't know exactly how Woolf lost me here, but she did. Maybe it wasn't as funny anymore? Maybe it was that the weirdness had piled on top of itself to a point that it no longer worked? I don't know exactly what happened, but the last part was a slog for me. Nevertheless, I enjoyed much about this book and came away with pages of quotes pulled from it.Recommended for: people who like snarkQuote: "No passion is stronger in the breast of a man than the desire to make others believe as he believes. Nothing so cuts at the root of his happiness and fills him with rage as the sense that another rates low what he prizes high."

[sanddune_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

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.