'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. Orlando flits between incarnations of either sex over 600 years of different lives. Orlando, a young man living in the Elizabethan age who is about to be transformed. The story also ends with Orlando, a woman writer living in the 20th century. The entire novel is a fictionalised history of Vita Sackville-West, of an imagined past life she lived under the guise of Orlando several centuries before she met Woolf. The prose is beautiful but the story disjointed. The exploration of self, identity within the framework of history is interesting.
“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.”
Marks out of 10: between 5 - 9
Words used to describe it: fabulous, lonely, romp, raphsody, ahead of its time, bonkers, roller coaster/Alice in Wonderland feel
Next Book
Lessons in Chemistry by Bonny Garmus
Next Meeting
Monday 11th September at 126 Harbord St
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