Attorneys of Orlando

Orlando (Wordsworth Classics)

Description

Virginia Woolf's Orlando 'The longest and most charming love letter in literature', playfully constructs the figure of Orlando as the fictional embodiment of Woolf's close friend and lover, Vita Sackville-West. Spanning three centuries, the novel opens as Orlando, a young 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 Costantinople, awakes to find that he is a woman, and the novel indulges in farce and irony to consider the roles of women in the 18th and 19th centuries. As the novel ends in 1928, a year consonant with full suffrage for women. Orlando, now a wife and mother, stands poised at the brink of a future that holds new hope and promise for women.

In 1928, way before everyone else was talking about gender-bending and way, way before the terrific movie with Tilda Swinton, Virginia Woolf wrote her comic masterpiece, a fantastic, fanciful love letter disguised as a biography, to Vita Sackville-West. Orlando enters the book as an Elizabethan nobleman and leaves the book three centuries and one change of gender later as a liberated woman of the 1920s. Along the way this most rambunctious of Woolf's characters engages in sword fights, trades barbs with 18th century wits, has a baby, and drives a car. This is a deliriously written, breathless-making book and a classic both of lesbian literature and the Western canon.

Reviews

Rating: 5 / 5
Date: 2010-06-28
Summary: "I shall dream wild dreams"

No lover in the world ever wrote a valentine more exquisite than Virginia Woolf's tribute to her lover Vita Sackville-West. That tribute was "Orlando: A Biography," a magical-realism tale about a perpetually youthful, charming hero/ine who traverses three centuries and both genders -- and Woolf's writing reaches a new peak as she explores the hauntingly sensuous world of Orlando.

Orlando was born a young aristocratic man in the time of Queen Elizabeth I, and when the dying monarch visited his home she became his new court favorite (and briefly lover). His passionate, curious personality attracted many other women over the years -- until he fell in love with Sasha, a mercurial but faithless Russian princess (supposedly based on Sackville-West's ex-girlfriend). Bereft of true love, he devoted himself to poetry and entertainment.

But then he's assigned to be an ambassador to Constantinople, and something strange happens -- while a bloody revolution rages, he sleeps for a full week... and wakes newly metamorphosed into a woman. With the same mind and soul but a female body, Orlando sets out on a new life -- and discovers that women aren't quite as different from men as she once thought.

"Orlando: A Biography" is a very weird book, and was even more so when it was written since "magical realism" didn't exist as a literary style in 1928. Virginia Woolf makes no explanations about Orlando's immortality or unexpected gender switch. It's simply accepted that once he was a man, and then she became a woman, and that s/he has lived from the Elizabethan era until at least the 1920s (and who knows, maybe Orlando still wanders among us?).

And Woolf's writing is at its peak here. Her prose is soaked in luxurious descriptions that constantly tease the senses -- silver and gold, frozen flowers, crystalline ice, starlight and the exquisite expanses of nature's beauty. At times the sensual writing seems almost feverish, and Woolf adds an almost mythic quality by inserting spirits of feminine virtues (Modesty, Purity and Chastity appear to try to hide Orlando's feminine body), and by having her hero/ine encounter great poets, queens and men of the sea.

And Orlando him/herself is a truly fascinating character -- s/he can be sweet, passionate, romantic, wild and melancholy, and s/he has an almost magnetic charisma. He starts off the story as an elusive romantic teenager, suffers a heartbreak that matures him as an artist, and post-metamorphosis she becomes a woman of the modern world. Both in mind and body, Orlando is a very different woman at the end than the boy s/he began as.

"Orlando: A Biography" is a truly spellbinding book -- Virginia Woolf's prose enthralls the senses while her main character explores the boundaries of gender. A must-read, for everyone.

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Rating: 4 / 5
Date: 2009-08-04
Summary: "Wonderful atmosphere, fascinating character, occasional eye-rolling"

Virginia Woolf caught a break in the publishing world, which is comparable to a 365-bedroom estate. But like Orlando, Woolf needed more than that. As a member of the working class, I found myself thinking 'nice that you have so much time to pontificate on life'. Is Orlando one of the rich and bored? One who dishes out but can't take it?

Take Sasha for instance. He calls her faithless when he's bedded every wench in town and is engaged to marry someone else when he meets her. Hard to sympathize with the guy. It's only a tragedy when he's the one hurting. Throughout Orlando's lives, he/she strikes me as a spoiled rich kid who wants to be useful and good but can't help being a punk sometimes. Very true to real life.

Woolf takes the reader through history fantastically; every scent and sense is unique to the years. Her observation on clothes being related to the person within is great. And even though people put a homosexual spin on the subject, I felt it was more about what a person is capable of and why a 'man' or 'woman' label is slapped on certain traits and abilities. If a woman is mechanically inclined, does she have to give up being feminine? If a man has a fashion sense, must he forfeit his masculinity?

In the end, I found myself wondering how Orlando would have turned out if he/she weren't so rich. Maybe it's my working-class distaste for pampered complainers that made we want to smack Orlando. But as a non-traditional woman, I also heard my thoughts echoed in Orlando's, especially when she 'yielded to the spirit of the age' and got married. That entire description of the pressure to marry was brilliant because it comes from without and within.

All in all, there are perks and drawbacks to being male or female. But Orlando shows we're not the only one who finds our talents stretch beyond what is considered a man's job or a woman's. Did Orlando have to become a woman to know love? Did his maleness make him a better ambassador? Nowadays we say 'of course not'. But Orlando personifies those questions, makes the reader aware of the chains of tradition. And just like Orlando's ancestry, are they anchors or dead weight? Or both?

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Rating: 4 / 5
Date: 2009-06-21
Summary: "A man, a woman... or both (though not at the same time)? 4 1/2 stars"

"He -- for there could be no doubt of his sex, though the fashion of the time did something to disguise it..."

Late-Elizabeth fashions were so flamboyant that you couldn't sometimes tell who was male and who was female. And that time frame sets the perfect tone for this witty and strange gender-bender. Orlando was sixteen at the time, and his boyish good looks made him quite popular at Queen Elizabeth's court. But his poetic sensibilities cannot handle heartbreak very well. A deceitful Russian princess has left quite an impression on him, and he broods over the fickleness and faithlessness in women. So time goes by, Elizabeth is followed by King James, and as generations pass Orlando becomes not only a nobleman of high rank, but he's also courtier, then an ambassador -- until he leaves it all behind when he becomes a woman. The new gender brings confusion. All of the things Orlando once took for granted -- his freedom, his power, his lands and rank -- are all jeopardized. But at the same time, she -- for now it is she -- discovers other pleasures and joys, and sometimes boredom, in the eighteenth century parties with celebrated noblemen and writers, and in Victorian times, when she experiences her first night with a man. After many centuries, it is in 1928, when this immortal being realizes that she is essentially the same person she has always been.

It is impossible to summarize this novel. Written in the form of a biography, Orlando covers quite a number of themes and discussions, and you'd have to read the book in order to appreciate it. You'll have to read it not only once, but several times. I think I will have to reread this in the near future in order to completely get it. This is a unique gender-bender, with feminist undertones, and a voice full of satire and magic realism for great measure. There are some wonderful passages here, full of humor. Take this one, for example:

"All of her estates are put in Chancery and her titles pronounced in abeyance while the suits were under litigation. Thus it was in a highly ambiguous condition, uncertain whether she was alive or dead, man or woman, Duke or nonentity, that she posted down to her country seat, where, pending the legal judgment, she had the Law's condition to reside in a state of incognito or incognita as the case might turn out to be."

The "incognito or incognita" is what made me laugh. Virginia Woolf was a great writer. I had once read To the Lighthouse and was indifferent about it. However, Orlando has compelled me to read other books by Woolf. Her wit, combined with the passage of time and historical references, made this an absolute delight to read. The one thing I do find confusing is the passage of time. For example, Orlando opens her window and stares out into the courtyard and beyond in the year 1712. After a series of descriptions and whatnot, the chapter ends with, "The Eighteenth century was over; the Nineteenth century had begun." And that is more or less how it occurs every time. In one sentence, it is still Victorian times, then it's Edwardian the next. Also, the whole gender change is too complicated to describe. As said earlier, you will have to read and reread the book in order to understand it. Some people don't get this book at all and hate it; others might enjoy Woolf's take on society norms and love it. I'm the latter. Orlando is a must-read if you're into some rather thought provoking and somewhat complicated literature.

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Rating: 3 / 5
Date: 2009-06-17
Summary: "The freedom to write what she liked"

This book proves that Virginia Woolf could write what she damned well pleased - she had a family publishing house that published all her work (is that the same as self-published these days?) and a literary salon that the who's-who of literature at the time frequented. An enviable position to be in and not have to risk the inevitable rejection letter from a publisher who wanted more of the same that sold. At one point she even celebrates the unpublished or self-published writer by saying "while fame impedes and constricts, obscurity lets the mind take its way unimpeded."

That said, Orlando is, in my mind, Woolf herself, taking a bold romp through history, spanning the centuries from Elizabethan to Edwardian times, free of the limitations of thinking in a particular sex, yet being bound by the conventions of his/her times depending on when Orlando was either a man or a woman - all the while letting us experience life in those particular times through the lenses of Orlando's thougths and through his/her biographer's descriptions and ruminations. Woolf's descriptioons of changing landscapes (London going from a clump of derelict buildings and muddy streets in Elizabethan England to a modern metropolis during the Restoration), political systems, customs (wearing a ring and being married became prominent during Victorian times), food ( crumpets and muffins were invented in the 19th century), women's sizes ("slim was in" in Edwardian London),speech (evasive conversation was espoused in Victorian England) are told in rich flowing prose that does not stint in its use of dashes and semicolons.

Time transitions take place during sleep, while thinking or while on a long voyage at sea, where our hero(ine)remains unaged (albeit, at times sex changed) as the world changes around her.

The pompous biographer that Woolf chooses as her device for rendering the story is also a free spirit, free to comment, jump from place to place, ruminate and sidebar - all needed in order to deliver a story of this vast time sweep.

I wouldn't read this novel for entertainment, but rather as a study of what experimental fiction must have been in Woolf's day.

My one regret is that with all this going for her ( no rejection slips, write whatever she wanted) our dear Virginia had to load herself up with stones and drown herself in a river. Oh, if she would only know the travails of the writer, let alone the experimental one, of today! Should we strap boulders to our necks and jump off cliffs, or like Orlando, should we just flit back ( or forward) in time to when writers were treated with more respect and given such freedom to experiment?

[...]

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Rating: 5 / 5
Date: 2009-03-23
Summary: "A fun read"

Orlando is adventure, comedy, gender study and literary commentary all rolled into one. The titular character lived through four centuries. During that time he served the Queen, fell in love with a Russian princess and lost her, entertained annoying guests, spent a century roaming in his estate, sailed out to exotic places where he became a she, and came back to find that her old love had grown fat.

A host of memorable characters populated the story, gifting it with eccentric moments: the pizza was toasted in the fireplace and the rug nearby was burned, the countess sneaked in the garden and "cackled and gaffled", and the sea captain was lured to chivalry by Orlando the lady's legs. The narrative is not as experimental as Woolf's earlier novels, but the prose is still intelligent and evocative. Woolf's laid-back style also makes the novel an easy, comforting read when you simply want some light entertainment.