Orlando - Virginia Woolf

A biography of an Elizabethan boy who lives for four hundred years becoming a woman halfway through his life and fulfilling his/her dream of becoming a published poet.


We are first introduced to Orlando as a boy living in Elizabethan times. His love for a Russian princess, who breaks his heart, is his undoing and causes him to retreat from the world. Preferring his own company and that of his dogs, he eventually becomes an Ambassador in Turkey and is found one day in a catatonic state. Upon his awaking he notices that he has become a woman and runs away with the local band of gypsies.

Eventually pining for real paper and ink (and the scenery of England) Orlando takes a boat and during her trip ponders her situation. She remembers that as a man she insisted that women must be ‘obedient, chaste, scented and exquisitely appareled’. Distressed she realizes that this could take up most of her day, and that her life of manly pursuits and decisions will now consist of pouring tea as soon as she sets foot on English soil. But she also sees how a woman can make a man look foolish – as demonstrated when a sailor nearly falls from the mast when he spies her ankles. Having been both man and woman she ‘knows the secrets and has shared the weaknesses of each’.

Orlando finds that there are many changes in London since her departure – the plague and fire have destroyed most of what she remembers, Wren has built St. Pauls Cathedral, and an air of culture now pervades.

Through the ages she had found love in nature, but never real love until the day she chases falling feathers onto the moors and breaks her ankle. Orlando is rescued by a horseman and becomes engaged immediately and eventually marries though he seems doomed to spend the rest of his life sailing around Cape Horn.

Finally she bumps into an old ‘friend’ the Elizabethan poet Nicholas Greene who re-reads her poem The Oak Tree (his initial reading three hundred years ago was unfavourable) and insists on arranging for it to be published.

I struggled with this book. I find it hard to accept magic realism or fantasy of this genre for some reason. I can accept that Gandalf in Lord of the Rings can be hundreds of years old because the story is set in another world and time, and I could probably accept that Orlando was somehow blessed with immortality but I couldn’t accept that other characters in this novel (such as Nicholas Greene) could also live through the ages!!

Most of the time I thought the book babbled on about total nonsense and I would find myself drifting away and having to re-read passages which was very annoying, as I just wanted to be done with it. The style is very dated and although you are surprised now and again with a spot of real humour, I didn’t really start to take note of the narrative until towards the end when the changes over the past 400 years come to light – but that was just interesting not enjoyable.

The novel has been described as the longest love letter ever written and was dedicated to Vita Sackville-West. For me it was a waste of valuable reading time.