Orlando – by Virginia Woolf – independent book review – Historical Fiction (England)

I’ve NEVER read a book like this one! And it’s difficult to describe.

ORLANDO is beautifully written and full of insightful observations about our human life. It feels like magical realism but was written long before that genre became mainstream. And, even though it was written nearly a hundred years ago, ORLANDO is so on target about gender fluidity and gender identity that it reads like 21st century commentary.

“The man looks the world full in the face, as if it were made for his uses and fashioned to his liking. The woman takes a sidelong glance at it, full of subtlety, even of suspicion.” (Chapter four)

ORLANDO IS also full of humor and serves as a biting satire on the British class system. I gave it four stars on Goodreads.

Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) dedicated this book to her lover, Vita Sackville-West (1892-1962). Which I think, at least in part, accounts for all the spot-on observations about gender. About the constraints society imposes on both men and women that limit their opportunities to thrive, narrow the behaviors considered acceptable and restrict their abilities to fully express their true selves to others. And, as a result, how little room there is for anyone whose gender or personality or behavior does not fit precisely into one of those two prescribed binary boxes.

“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.”  (Chapter four)

It felt to me as though the book’s protagonist, Orlando, might a fictitious substitute for the child Woolf and Sackville-West might have had together. Orlando is a beautiful, much-admired lord born into a wealthy, aristocratic British family in the later years of the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. By book’s end, in 1928, Orlando is middle-aged and has watched the transformation of Great Britain from a rural society with an appreciation of nature into a modern industrial powerhouse. During those nearly 400 years, Orlando has served as Ambassador to Turkey, lived with gypsies, met many literary giants, loved and been loved, been courted by Romanian nobility, and longed to be recognized as a successful poet.

But what I think Woolf has captured best in this novel is the continual questioning, self-criticism, and shifting thoughts each one of us contends with in our internal monologues. Do I want to be alone or with others? If I behave in a laudable way in a social setting, why am I sometimes horrified hours later when I review those same actions? Why are there so few connections of substance and conversely, why is so much that passes as social intercourse nothing but meaningless inanities? And why do all of us spend so much time keeping our true selves masked?

ORLANDO’s language is exceptionally rich and the commentary on all of us is deeply thoughtful. The book will no doubt raise interesting questions about your own behavior and those around you. Which may not feel comfortable for some. But I would so love to take an entire college course dedicated to discussing just SOME of the meaty issues Woolf raises in ORLANDO.

More about the author, Virginia Woolf.