ORLANDO by VIRGINIA WOOLF

ORLANDO

BY VIRGINIA WOOLF

THE BLURB:-

Virginia Woolf's Orlando, 'the longest and most charming love letter in literature,' playfully constructs the figure of Orlando as the fictional embodiment of Wool's close friend and lover, Vita Sackville-West. Spanning three centuries of boisterous, fantastic adventure, the novel opens as Orlando, a wronged nobleman in Elizabeth's England, awaits a visit from the Queen and traces his experience with first love as England under James I lies locked in the embrace of the Great Frost.

At the midpoint of the novel, Orlando, now an ambassador in Constantinople, awakes to find that he is a woman, and the novel's indulges in farce and irony to consider the role of women in the 18^th and 19^th centuries. As the novel ends in 1928, a year consonant with full suffrage for women, Orlando, now a wife and mother, stands poised on the brink of a future that holds new hope and promise for women.

THE REALITY:-

Wahey! I don't know if this is supposed to be bawdy, but that's how it came across to me. (And I do love a good romp!) Joking aside, I have never seen a book written in this way, where the central character has a life which spans around 400 years and changes sex halfway through (stick that in yer pipe and smoke it, all you “I have a right to be gender neutral/ fluid” snowflakes.)  It would seem that sexual ambiguity is nothing new, and I don't suppose you need me to tell you that.

I must confess, I approached this work with trepidation, as I found Woolf's “stream of consciousness” approach, evident in To The Lighthouse, a bit drawn out- though effective. There was no such approach with this novel, and I regret that I didn't have the time spare to flow through and really get into the first half. But I did with the second half, and flattened 80 pages in one night (it's not a long novel, at 162 pages.)

I am currently studying the “self”, so I'm glad I was able to pull out some important quotes from this work for reference and I also found the introductory notes at the beginning helpful (I have learnt my lesson from a previous novel, and read the notes after I'd finished the story, otherwise they can take away the element of surprise.)

This book was inspired by the life of Woolf's lesbian lover, Vita Sackville-West (although Vita's mother reacted to the novel by defacing it) and is both away with the fairies, but fun at the same time. It's a good study of life and times throughout various ages, and the mannerisms and customs of this varied setting are depicted fluently. I'm glad it included parts of good ol' London town, as I was easily able to visualise the City, at the point where (spoiler alert!) Orlando gets his heart broken. I could feel for Orlando, although this wasn't a novel that seemed to offer up too much in-depth study of emotions- rather it was more about action. Orlando returns to her lands with quite a poignant ending, suitable for a lover of reading and writing (I've recently studied whether these should be one word, as they run in tangent with each other if you are a writer, but... readingandwriting flipped flings up the word dreading, offending the eyeballs, so that's a no.)

Give this a go, I dare you! It will captivate you and make you smile, and really, isn't that just what a good novel should do?