Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Unavailable
    Orlando
    Unavailable
    Orlando
    Unavailable
    Orlando
    Ebook259 pages6 hours

    Orlando

    By Virginia Woolf

    4/5

    ()

    Unavailable in your country

    Unavailable in your country

    Listen to the audiobook instead

    About this ebook

    Orlando: A Biography is a novel by Virginia Woolf, first published on 11 October 1928. A high-spirited romp inspired by the tumultuous family history of Woolf's close friend, the aristocratic poet and novelist Vita Sackville-West, it is arguably one of Woolf's most popular and accessible novels: a history of English literature in satiric form. The book describes the adventures of a poet who changes sex from man to woman and lives for centuries, meeting the key figures of English literary history. Considered a feminist classic, the book has been written about extensively by scholars of women's writing and gender and transgender studies.
    There have been several adaptations: in 1989 director Robert Wilson and writer Darryl Pinckney collaborated on a theatrical production. A film adaptation was released in 1992, starring Tilda Swinton as Orlando and Quentin Crisp as Queen Elizabeth I. Another stage adaption by Sarah Ruhl premiered in New York City in 2010 (font: Wikipedia).
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherVirginia Woolf
    Release dateAug 28, 2015
    ISBN9786050410792
    Author

    Virginia Woolf

    VIRGINIA WOOLF (1882–1941) was one of the major literary figures of the twentieth century. An admired literary critic, she authored many essays, letters, journals, and short stories in addition to her groundbreaking novels, including Mrs. Dalloway, To The Lighthouse, and Orlando.

    Read more from Virginia Woolf

    Related to Orlando

    Related ebooks

    Literary Fiction For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Helen McCrory

      Dec 31, 2021

      Helen McCrory
      3 min read

    • Article

      Restless Herd

      Apr 14, 2021

      Restless Herd
      21 min read

    • Article

      Hero and Heroine

      Jun 11, 2019

      Hero and Heroine
      4 min read

    • Article

      Jan Morris

      Jun 15, 2018

      I have always rather envied the poet Ovid, who was banished from Rome by the emperor Augustus, you may remember, to a remote place called Tomis on the shores of the Black Sea. There he died, ten years later, and his exile has gone into legend and int

      17 min read

    • Article

      U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón

      Dec 14, 2022

      U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón
      2 min read

    • Article

      A Conversation

      Sep 1, 2021

      I’ve known Melissa Broder for almost a decade. I invited her to my first book party because I was a big admirer of her writing and I wanted to meet her. She was smart and funny and I could tell she wanted to know something about what any of us are do

      11 min read

    • Article

      Five Poems

      Nov 1, 2018

      Moon river, swollen river, river of starholeand bright, harness river, lichen river,river we velvet with our filth.River of butter and river of witches, rivercracked open careful like egg, or burstapart, unleashing its violet load.River mouths, river

      2 min read

    • Article

      Re-Covered: The Mischief

      Dec 2, 2019

      Re-Covered: The Mischief
      8 min read

    • Article

      How to Live

      Feb 12, 2020

      IT IS hard to believe now, but until relatively recently there were usually just two places you could see a writer you admired: on the back flap of a book or at a public event. In the 1960s and 1970s, a very small number of writers, James Baldwin and

      9 min read

    • Article

      The 11 Best Elizabeth Bishop Poems

      Jun 28, 2019

      She published only 100 poems in her lifetime and yet is still considered one of the most important and distinguished American poets of the 20th century. The post The 11 Best Elizabeth Bishop Poems appeared first on The Millions.

      5 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Orlando

    4/5

    1,797 ratings74 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 2/5
      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.
    • 2/5
      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.
    • 4/5
      It's crazy. In a good way.
    • 2/5
      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.
    • 5/5
      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.
    • 4/5
      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.
    • 1/5
      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.
    • 3/5
      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
    • 3/5
      Surreal and eclectic. As a piece of allegory, this was an interesting book. A bit long-winded in places but still mostly entertaining.
    • 4/5
      This is an odd book by any stretch of the imagination.
    • 3/5
      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.
    • 4/5
      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!
    • 4/5
      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.
    • 5/5
      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.
    • 5/5
      A lovely, lively meditation on biography, history, reading, human nature and sexuality. Amusing, witty, and thought-provoking all at once. Highly recommended.
    • 5/5
      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.
    • 1/5
      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.
    • 3/5
      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.
    • 5/5
      Loads of fun, effortless prose, and one hell of a love note. Not your usual Woolf!
    • 5/5
      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.
    • 3/5
      Orlando features less of the beautiful prose passages that I associate with Woolf's writing than her other works, which leaves the story to carry much of the burden. Unlike Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse (and I suspect The Waves, which I shall read shortly), there is an actual story here focusing on the life of the titular Orlando. Orlando occupies a strange semi-supernatural role where both sex and gender shift and the years pass without leaving much trace. It's an interesting center for the story in theory, though in practice I found Orlando to be a rather uninteresting character who goes from a pining youth to a married woman without inspiring much interest or sympathy from me. The character exists in different time periods more than s/he lives in them, making the different ages mere window dressing. Eventually the book ends, though it doesn't feel so much like the story has concluded as it does that Woolf thought she had written enough.

      Decidedly different from most Woolf in both style and substance, I thought this one was alright.
    • 3/5
      On the back cover it states that this is one of Virginia Woolf's most popular and entertaining works. Last year I had read Mrs. Dalloway, my first Woolf, and enjoyed it a lot more.(VERY MILD SPOILERS)The book was interesting, but it didn't grip me. It is a fantastical biography about Orlando, starting with him as a 16-yr old boy sometime in the 1500's, who eventually turns into a woman (I don't think this is a spoiler - it's written on the back of the book...), and is still a relatively young woman when the novel ends in 1928. Orlando is rich with a large estate and is in good favor with the Queen. He has a romance with a Russian princess (at least we think she is), and many others, gets to be Ambassador to Turkey, turns into a woman, has more affairs, and so on.There was lots of just the narrator stepping in and saying how this part is boring. Also, there were some confusing bits, like at one point I think she got pregnant, but it wasn't really clear. But then years later (I think) she gives birth. And then no mention of her child. I was used to that a bit from Mrs. Dalloway, but it was a lot worse in this book.It took me a lot longer to read than it should have; I figured I definitely would have finished it by the end of the year, but it just dragged on and on, and it was a chore to finish.I haven't said a lot of good things about the book, and I'm sorry about that. There were interesting parts here and there, and it did spawn a neat movie, but all in all, I didn't think it was that great.I'm going to give it 3 stars; I'm vacillating a bit, quite ambivalent about it, but I think that's what it should get on my scale.
    • 2/5
      about a person that changes genders and lives over several centuries
    • 5/5
      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…”
    • 3/5
      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.
    • 5/5
      The story begins with Orlando as a passionate young nobleman in Queen Elizabeth's court. By the end, Orlando is a 36-year-old woman three centuries later. Orlando witnesses the making of history from its edge. A close examination of the nature of sexuality and the changing climate of the passing centuries. Very novel and engaging if a bit loose-ended at times.
    • 4/5
      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.
    • 5/5
      This book is one of a kind; I have heard people condemn the book vehemently but I myself enjoyed it tremendously.The key to enjoying the book is to recognize the humour; I've laughed out loud at many of the passages. If the humour is not the kind you appreciate or even recognize you will surely dislike the book as much as I like it.The lengthy paragraphs are a deliberate device of the author. It is an intriguing introduction to English literature; I found myself a good deal more interested in the Augustan poets after I finished the book.
    • 3/5
      I didn't particularly enjoy Virginia Woolf's "Orlando". It was a rather fantastical yet dull story.... and I really wasn't able to discern what Woolf was trying to say.There are a few brilliant passages of prose -- particularly the part with the frozen river Thames. The story is of a man who turns into a woman and then lives 300 years.... I'm not sure what the point of it all was. This is the fourth Woolf book I've read and she clearly isn't a good match for me. I only really enjoyed "The Years," which has a much more traditional narrative and style. There are several authors that I feel like I'm just not smart enough to understand and Woolf is among them.
    • 4/5
      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.