Review: Orlando
Virginia Woolf
329 pages
Mariner Books (1928)
Read this if you like: Charlotte Perkins Gilman, magical realism, literary satire
tl;dr summary: 16th-century aristocratic English teenager grows up into a 19th-century British woman and has many adventures along the way.
Speculative fiction and Virginia Woolf don’t seem to belong in the same sentence—at least, that was my assumption before reading Orlando. But, as with so very many things I once thought I knew, it turns out I was wrong.
Of course, Virginia Woolf is still Virginia Woolf, even when she’s writing about immortal gender-switching poets. Linguistically, Orlando maintains her distinctive voice. The long, lyrical sentences unspool into each other, reading at times like poetry, in other places similar to the stream-of-consciousness style narrative I remember from To the Lighthouse.
This voice works incredibly well for the type of speculative story Orlando tells. I would put the book somewhere in the “magical realism” camp of the fantasy spectrum. Orlando’s switch from male to female isn’t just unexplained but it goes almost entirely unremarked by the other characters, even those who knew Orlando in both gender iterations.
The same goes for their functional immortality—Orlando ages throughout the book but only by about 20 years from the early 1500s until the story stops in 1928 (the “present” at the time of writing). Interestingly, Orlando isn’t the only one with an extended lifespan. Fellow poet Nicholas Greene, for example, also lives for centuries, though he apparently ages much faster than Orlando; he’s around 70 when she’s still in her mid-30s. Even her favorite elkhound seems to share her longevity (though I suppose this could just be her giving the same name to a new dog; this style of writing isn’t the best for that kind of clarity).
The point is: most of the characters in Orlando seem to live, age, and die according to consensus reality, but some don’t, and this fact elicits no comments from the people around them. In fact, some aspects of society seem to slow down in keeping with the long lifespans, like the long legal battle over whether Orlando still has a right to her estates now that she’s a woman. Even here, there’s never any mention of someone questioning the change, only what rights that grants her under British land ownership laws.
Now, one could argue that this lack of explanation for such a major non-real detail pushes the story from fantasy into extended metaphor. That’s how the book is normally classified, and Orlando is often described as a satirical history of English literature. The form of a fictional biography plays into this, allowing for grand commentaries and interjections from the unseen biographer. The satire element was probably more obvious for contemporary readers, who would have been familiar with the era’s literary figures and trends. The themes and meaning of Orlando have been discussed plenty by people much smarter than I am in the subject so I’m not going to waste any time restating what others have already said better.
Besides, I’m not really as concerned with that symbolism and thematic meaning—I could tell it was there, and I appreciate it, but when I’m reading a book what I’m interested in is the story. And that’s one of the things I found most masterful about Orlando: it still kept me turning the page, wanting to read what was next. Granted, things like character development and plot movement were a bit more loosey-goosey than I usually prefer, but it doesn’t sacrifice readability to make its points (something that can’t be said for a lot of the “important” books I’ve read from this era).
The biographer voice I think played a big role in this. That extra layer of storytelling distance between Orlando’s story and the reader gave the book freedom to push toward a more tall tale space, while the rich imagery and expansive sentences pull it away from reading too dry or academic. This is important because it allows Woolf to slide into a close 3rd POV on Orlando when the situation calls for it without jarring the reader or disrupting the voice.
The way Woolf integrates historical events and figures into Orlando is also something worth studying, especially for writers of alternate histories, historical fantasies, and other speculative work set in the past. The Great Frost, for instance. I don’t know that era well so I had to consult the experts to learn that yes, there really were Frost Fairs on the surface of the Thames, and there really were times the ice melted so quickly that people died and ships were dragged away. But Woolf takes her liberties with these real-world events. The way she describes them pulls them into the fantastical, at the same time connecting the thaw to the departure of the Russian ship and, with it, Orlando’s love Sasha. It’s not just a historical detail dropped in to add authenticity—it’s woven in at the plot, theme, and character levels.
Getting into Orlando took some mental adjustment. A lot has changed in the nearly 100 years since this book came out, both in the way writers tell stories and in the views and values of society. The finer points of the satire are likely lost on many modern readers, but enough wit still shines through that I genuinely laughed out loud at a few points. Overall, it’s definitely worth adding to your list if you’re looking to catch up on the classics, especially for fantasy writers or those interested in feminist literature (and double especially if you’re both).
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