First and foremost ‘Orlando’ is a joke, a jeu d’esprit. Who knew that the author of the essentially tragic novels ‘Jacob’s Room’, ‘Mrs Dalloway’ and ‘To The Lighthouse’ (key figures die in all of them) had a funny bone.

But here she is, creating the comic biography of a fantastical figure, a person who lives from the later years of Queen Elizabeth I (the 1580s) right through to the last pages, set in 1928, some 340 years later.

The comic biographer

Several aspects become clear early on. One is our old friend the intrusive narrator, presenting, displaying and commenting on their presentation of the characters and events. The narrator appears as the gently mocked figure of The Good Biographer, mocking her own role:

Happy the mother who bears, happier still the biographer who records the life of such a one!

And so, mounting up the spiral stairway into his brain–which was a roomy one–all these sights, and the garden sounds too, the hammer beating, the wood chopping, began that riot and confusion of the passions and emotions which every good biographer detests…

Directly we glance at eyes and forehead, we have to admit a thousand disagreeables which it is the aim of every good biographer to ignore.

And the biographer should here call attention to the fact that this clumsiness is often mated with a love of solitude.

Here, indeed, we lay bare rudely, as a biographer may, a curious trait in him…

And so on. From the get-go, the entire concept of a biography is mocked and lampooned from within, so to speak.

Mockery and comic exaggeration

As to the content, this also is lampooned in a number of styles. It is mildly mocking to write something like:

His fathers had been noble since they had been at all. They came out of the northern mists wearing coronets on their heads.

But it is deliberately absurd to write that, from the hilltop in the family park Orlando could see nineteen English counties, on a clear day, thirty or perhaps forty; that you could sometimes see the English Channel in one direction, London off to the east, and away on the horizon Mount Snowdon. This is mockery of the braggadocio of Elizabethan literature, gross exaggeration in the spirit of Rabelais. It is reinforced when we are told that from one side to the other of the family house is five acres! Or that the Billiard Table Court is half a mile away on the south side of the house! That Orlando’s country home could house a thousand men and two thousand horses! Or that in the two years since coming to manhood, he had written ‘no more than’ twenty tragedies, a dozen histories and a score of sonnets!

So early on you realise the book features 1) a humorously intrusive and self-mocking narrator and 2) a stance of Rabelaisian hyperbole.

Sex?

Sex was conspicuous by its complete absence in ‘Jacob’s Room’, ‘Mrs Dalloway’ and ‘To The Lighthouse’. Woolf and her characters are far too well bred to refer to such an ignoble and degrading aspect of human existence. Which makes it all the more surprising that it seems to rear its head here, albeit in comic and slightly puzzling ways.

The first chapter is dominated by the figure of the antique, arthritic, bent and smelly figure of Queen Elizabeth I, shrouded in layers of musty clothing, not, admittedly, at first sight, a very sexy figure. But sex appears to be what she fancies Orlando for.

For the old woman loved him. And the Queen, who knew a man when she saw one, though not, it is said, in the usual way, plotted for him a splendid ambitious career.

‘Not in the usual way’? What might that mean? Vividly but coyly:

At the height of her triumph when the guns were booming at the Tower and the air was thick enough with gunpowder to make one sneeze and the huzzas of the people rang beneath the windows, she pulled him down among the cushions where her women had laid her (she was so worn and old) and made him bury his face in that astonishing composition–she had not changed her dress for a month–which smelt for all the world, he thought, recalling his boyish memory, like some old cabinet at home where his mother’s furs were stored. He rose, half suffocated from the embrace. ‘This’, she breathed, ‘is my victory!’–even as a rocket roared up and dyed her cheeks scarlet.

Hmm, is the rocket that soared up and reddened the old queen’s cheeks a euphemism for something?

Historical fantasia

But these are aspects. The central aim of the text is an opportunity for Woolf to let rip on a personal review of British history without being serious, to pile up exaggerated caricatures of the Elizabethan age, the Augustan era, the nineteenth century, without worrying about accuracy, dates, facts or narrative.

And so it is that pretty quickly in section 1, Orlando is heading off to the darkest dives of dockland and hearing outrageous stories of pirates and buccaneers! The queen had already spied him, through a half open door, kissing a waiting woman, and smashed a mirror in her jealous rage. Now Orlando appears to sleep with common trulls down at the docks.

But when he gets bored and returns to court, magically years have passed, it is now the court of King James and we for the first time realise how time is going to skate by for our young hero. At the Jacobean court Orlando has affairs with three ladies, being Clorinda, Favilla, Euphrosyne, and writes them all poems. Poems and poetry are, we realise, going to be a big deal for Orlando, a lifelong obsession.

The Great Frost comes and freezes the Thames solid. At about this point, 30 pages in, I began to notice the absence of dialogue. Woolf enjoys piling description on description of comically exaggerated Horrible Histories aspects of each era, but there is no real plot and no real incidents. Nothing detailed and specific enough happens to warrant dialogue.

Love inevitably

All this sounds promising but there has been a fatality, a thumping inevitability about the Edwardian novels I’ve read over the past few months, the novels of H.G. Wells, E.M. Forster, D.H. Lawrence and now Virginia Woolf – which is that they’ve all been about LOVE. LURV. Relations between the sexes. Mating.

As ornately written and psychologically penetrating as they may be, in the end they all rotate around the same theme as a corny Richard Curtis movie: Love Actually or Bridget Jones’s Diary. And so it is here, love love love dominates what passes for a plot on ‘Orlando’

And so it is that the coming of the Great Frost is only the backdrop for Orlando falling for the (comically named) Princess Marousha Stanilovska Dagmar Natasha Iliana Romanovitch and they have an affair.

Androgyny

Literary academics, especially feminist ones, have been obsessed by sex and gender for generations, since when? the 1960s? Earlier? So for 60 years or more ‘Orlando’ has been a goldmine for lecturers in feminist studies, women’s literature, queer studies and so on. The reason is that, instead of a decent plot which develops and ramifies over the three centuries the book covers (a notion which has all kinds of science fiction possibilities), instead ‘Orlando’ really only contains one event – half way through it, Woolf has her protagonist change gender, from man to woman, a dazzling transformation which completely overshadows the book’s feeble attempts at a plot.

Orlando was a man till the age of thirty; when he became a woman and has remained so ever since.

The way had been prepared for this surprise by some (admittedly only a handful) of moments when the protagonist of her book questions the gender of the people he falls in love with. Thus he is initially unsure about the gender of the Russian he is attracted to:

He beheld, coming from the pavilion of the Muscovite Embassy, a figure, which, whether boy’s or woman’s, for the loose tunic and trousers of the Russian fashion served to disguise the sex, filled him with the highest curiosity… When the boy, for alas, a boy it must be–no woman could skate with such speed and vigour–swept almost on tiptoe past him, Orlando was ready to tear his hair with vexation that the person was of his own sex, and thus all embraces were out of the question. But the skater came closer. Legs, hands, carriage, were a boy’s, but no boy ever had a mouth like that; no boy had those breasts; no boy had eyes which looked as if they had been fished from the bottom of the sea.

This is his first sighting and falling lust with the Princess Marousha Stanilovska Dagmar Natasha Iliana Romanovitch, which serves to introduce the theme of androgyny or gender ambiguity. And there’s some sex, maybe, described with the same vagueness as the Queen Elizabeth scenes:

Hot with skating and with love they would throw themselves down in some solitary reach, where the yellow osiers fringed the bank, and wrapped in a great fur cloak Orlando would take her in his arms, and know, for the first time, he murmured, the delights of love. Then, when the ecstasy was over and they lay lulled in a swoon.

But it’s the big switcheroo from male to female on page 87 which has excited gender-obsessed academics, commentators and critics from Virginia’s day to our own.

London

Love is a boring subject, love and marriage and affairs and infidelity – after the first few thousand novels centred on love and marriage you wonder whether writers can imagine any other subject. And the sex-changing androgyny at the centre of this book may get leather-jacketed academics hot and bothered but is, in the end, surprisingly dull, surprisingly underdeveloped.

Instead I preferred to think that maybe for the first hundred pages until Orlando changes sex, what the book is really about is London. London is, after all, the unnamed star of ‘Mrs Dalloway’ and here, again, it is a central character. The notion of a whistlestop tour through history from Elizabethan times allows Woolf to write long passages describing London dressed for various historical pageants and carnivals, which are very enjoyable.

The historic scenery of London:

It was an evening of astonishing beauty. As the sun sank, all the domes, spires, turrets, and pinnacles of London rose in inky blackness against the furious red sunset clouds. Here was the fretted cross at Charing; there the dome of St Paul’s; there the massy square of the Tower buildings; there like a grove of trees stripped of all leaves save a knob at the end were the heads on the pikes at Temple Bar. Now the Abbey windows were lit up and burnt like a heavenly, many-coloured shield (in Orlando’s fancy); now all the west seemed a golden window with troops of angels (in Orlando’s fancy again) passing up and down the heavenly stairs perpetually. (p.30, compare p.144)

The historical people of London:

By this time Orlando and the Princess were close to the Royal enclosure and found their way barred by a great crowd of the common people, who were pressing as near to the silken rope as they dared. Loth to end their privacy and encounter the sharp eyes that were on the watch for them, the couple lingered there, shouldered by apprentices; tailors; fishwives; horse dealers, cony catchers; starving scholars; maid-servants in their whimples; orange girls; ostlers; sober citizens; bawdy tapsters; and a crowd of little ragamuffins such as always haunt the outskirts of a crowd, screaming and scrambling among people’s feet–all the riff-raff of the London streets indeed was there, jesting and jostling, here casting dice, telling fortunes, shoving, tickling, pinching… (p.31)

You get the picture. Or rather series of pictures. Maybe the book is like leafing through a series of historical tableaux – the ice and skating of this particular passage reminded me of the winter scenes of countless Dutch painters.

Cheesy pulp

At the same time, quite often it reads like the cheesiest kind of historical melodrama, a ripping historical yarn by Robert Louis Stevenson or any number of his copyists. Here is Orlando planning to meet up with his mistress and escape from London!

The darkness then became even deeper than before. Orlando looked to the wicks of his lantern, saw to the saddle girths; primed his pistols; examined his holsters; and did all these things a dozen times at least till he could find nothing more needing his attention. Though it still lacked some twenty minutes to midnight, he could not bring himself to go indoors to the inn parlour, where the hostess was still serving sack and the cheaper sort of canary wine to a few seafaring men… The darkness was more compassionate to his swollen and violent heart. He listened to every footfall; speculated on every sound. Each drunken shout and each wail from some poor wretch laid in the straw or in other distress cut his heart to the quick, as if it boded ill omen to his venture. (p.33)

‘As if it boded ill omen to his venture.’ Woolf is letting her hair down. Having worked so hard at capturing the ever-changing moods of her characters in ‘Jacob’s Room’, ‘Mrs Dalloway’ and ‘To The Lighthouse’, this is a holiday. Let’s write a historical fantasia in the melodramatic cod Elizabethan!

So what about the plot?

Chapter 1. Elizabeth I and James I

Orlando comes of age in the court of Queen Elizabeth I. She makes him a favourite of hers and they have one or two close encounters till she sees him kissing a waiting lady in some corridor so he hides out in the pubs and stews of docklands. By the time Orlando tires of this, King James I is on the throne and so Orlando attends court. He is betrothed to Lady Margaret O’Brien O’Dare O’Reilly Tyrconnel who he writes a sonnet sequence for. But he falls in love with the Princess Marousha Stanilovska Dagmar Natasha Iliana Romanovitch (from Russia) who he calls Sasha. It is the winter of the Great Frost and they ice skate on the frozen Thames. He arranges to elope with her one dark and stormy night (in order to run away from his engagement to Lady Margaret) but she never shows up and, at dawn, he sees that the frost has thawed and the Thames is flowing again. Riding downstream Orlando sees that the previously ice-bound ships are now all free, and sees on the horizon the ship of the Ambassador from Muscovy which has sailed, with Sasha onboard. Oh well.

Chapter 2. From Charles I to Charles II

As mentioned, the narrative enjoys mocking the figure of The Biographer:

The biographer is now faced with a difficulty which it is better perhaps to confess than to gloss over. Up to this point in telling the story of Orlando’s life, documents, both private and historical, have made it possible to fulfil the first duty of a biographer, which is to plod, without looking to right or left, in the indelible footprints of truth; unenticed by flowers; regardless of shade; on and on methodically till we fall plump into the grave and write finis on the tombstone above our heads. (38)

So Orlando goes home to his country estate and sleeps for a week solid. When he awakes he can barely remember his former self, which gives rise to some Woolfian comedy:

Has the finger of death to be laid on the tumult of life from time to time lest it rend us asunder? Are we so made that we have to take death in small doses daily or we could not go on with the business of living? And then what strange powers are these that penetrate our most secret ways and change our most treasured possessions without our willing it? Had Orlando, worn out by the extremity of his suffering, died for a week, and then come to life again? And if so, of what nature is death and of what nature life? Having waited well over half an hour for an answer to these questions, and none coming, let us get on with the story.

I was hoping something would happen but nothing much does. Instead, alas, all that Woolf can think to do with her character is make him bookish, like her, like her family, like her Bloomsbury circle. It feels like a lamentable failure of imagination.

And so it turns out young Orlando is addicted to reading and, with thumping inevitability, also to writing. The narrator jokes about it a bit and so with the standard comic exaggeration ‘the biographer’ claims that before the age of 25 Orlando has already written some forty-seven plays, histories, romances, poems; some in prose, some in verse; some in French, some in Italian; all romantic, and all long’ (p.45). As far as it goes that’s sort of funny but… a bookish writer making the hero of her book a bookish writer… It feels like a failure of imagination.

There follows a mock epic, tongue-in-cheek description of Orlando the poet’s great struggles with Memory and Composition but you can’t help being disappointed that he is (alas) trying to write about ‘love’. Around page 50 I began to wonder whether I could be bothered to finish this increasingly laboured joke.

In the ‘Oxen of the Sun’ chapter of his famous modernist novel, ‘Ulysses’, James Joyce pastiches the evolution of the English language, its syntax, grammar and vocabulary, from Old English through to the 19th century. Woolf’s attempts to pastiche Elizabethan and Jacobean prose are nowhere next to Joyce’s genius. It might have been interesting if Woolf had indicated the passing years by a slowly evolving prose style matching each era, but she doesn’t. It’s quite obvious she’s not capable of such precision. Instead the prose is just a feeble cod-Elizabethan which often gives way to just bad historical bodice-ripper prose, which is not particularly convincing.

Take a sentence from the quote above:

Has the finger of death to be laid on the tumult of life from time to time lest it rend us asunder?

This is more Victorian than Elizabethan: ‘rend us asunder’ is from the age of Tennyson not Shakespeare, and indicates the fundamental Victorian basis of all Woolf’s prose.

Back to the plot or what there is of it: Orlando invites a supposed poet, Nicholas Greene, for dinner. But instead of the inspired words of fire which Orlando is naively made to expect, Greene actually regales Orlando with a list of his physical ailments, complains how poorly poetry pays, and rattles off reasons for despising Shakespeare, Marlowe and Donne (although he likes Ben Jonson). Apparently, they are all money-minded drunkards who scribbled down snatches of verse on the back of laundry lists.

The Biographer tells us that Nicholas told a thousand and one witty anecdotes about these great names but, unfortunately, none of them are repeated here and the reader can’t help feel very badly cheated. Can’t Woolf make up even one little tale? No. Not a flicker of interest.

Orlando feels for Greene ‘a strange mixture of liking and contempt, of admiration and pity’ and I couldn’t help feeling the same for Woolf. All the effort that went into this long farrago, all the posh people she consulted and she names in a swanky two-page Acknowledgements section. And yet not a single laugh in the entire work. Sad face.

Greene repays Orlando’s hospitality by returning to his chaotic house in London and rattling off a biting satire of the Orlando and his mansion (‘Visit to a Nobleman in the Country’), which includes quotations from Orlando’s favourite tragedy (which he generously shared with him), and becomes very popular. When shown a copy, Orlando orders it to be buried in a midden and orders a flunky to travel to Norway and bring back a batch of elk hounds, for, in his disgust, he has done with the world of men.

And so Orlando takes to walking round his beautiful park enjoying nature and the changing seasons. Though on all these long walks he is still troubled by the tritest of questions: what is love? what is friendship? what is truth?

In a couple of paragraphs Woolf throws away one of the two or three premises of the book, explaining that clock time and the time we experience are often at odds or even contradict each other – as if nobody else had ever noticed this before or it had never been written down and analysed by plenty of cleverer minds.

Her hero vapours on about Love and Truth and Poetry for page after page. As I struggled through this piffle I remembered that Woolf, born in 1882, was fully formed during the late-Victorian era i.e. was 18 when Queen Victoria finally died, and still, in 1927, was whiffling on about essentially Victorian issues and using a Victorian reading list. She tells us that Orlando goes on ‘thinking’ but, unfortunately, doesn’t give him anything to think about, except Love and Truth and Poetry. Elizabethan literature has a kind of intellectual virility about it at the same time as its astonishing sensuality. ‘Orlando’ has neither. The resolutely sexless Woolf emasculates everything she touches. Orlando’s thoughts and occasional verse sound like John Keats on a very off day.

Very casually, in a throwaway sentence, we learn that Orlando has mooned about his park for the entire Civil War, the execution of Charles I, the Commonwealth of Oliver Cromwell, and now a new king (Charles II) has been restored (p.65). Well, that is a massive opportunity missed, the most dramatic events in British history glossed over in preference for Orlando’s worthless vapourings about love, pages and pages of stuff like this:

And he despaired of being able to solve the problem of what poetry is and what truth is and fell into a deep dejection.

Orlando decides to renovate his comically vast mansion (with its three hundred and sixty-five bedrooms and 52 staircases) and the author gives us a plethora of details, claiming the list of repairs ran to 99 pages.

The arrival of lists and numbers prompted the thought that the book had turned into a sort of cod historical version of Flaubert’s masterpiece, Bouvard and Pecuchet (1881), in which a pair of half-educated dolts set out to make themselves masters of all human knowledge. Orlando sets about renovating his mansion with much the same encyclopedic attention to detail. Or like Joris-Karl Huysmans’ famous novel, Against the Grain (1884), in which a jaded nobleman locks himself away in his country house to savour the exquisite products of decadence. ‘Orlando’ has the same sense of Woolf working through a list of topics in a mechanical, plodding way. Except that it entirely lacks the style and wit of the two French novels. Wit relies on precision; instead Woolf has airy whimsy, a completely different quality. Woolf is always vague and explicitly celebrates the vagueness of her female protagonists (Clarissa Dalloway, Mrs Ramsay, Eleanor Pargiter).

So Orlando completely renovates his vast mansion and then, noticing how cold and empty it feels, embarks on a mad course of entertainment, such that the 365 bedrooms are always full and the 52 staircases always thronged, for which he is rewarded with many accolades and honours from local and national worthies and, of course, numerous poems written about him etc.

One day out of the blue appears in the inner courtyard a very tall woman on a horse. It is the Archduchess Harriet Griselda of Finster-Aarhorn and Scand-op-Boom in the Roumanian territory. (Clearly Woolf thinks that giving her women characters cumbrously long names is side-splittingly funny.)

Griselda titters and haw haws uncontrollably. On a further visit she stoops down to attach a piece of armour to Orlando’s leg and our hero suddenly feels the pangs of love, because this is, apparently, the only plot subject Woolf can think of.

Intellectual arguments about religion or politics from the great century of political and religious upheaval, about the advent of the New Science, the founding of the Royal Society, the new fashion for experimental science? No. Love actually.

In fact, surprisingly, it might also have something to do with LUST. If I’m reading the euphemistic roundabout way she describes it, I think the sight of a pretty woman kneeling in front of him triggers a natural physical reaction in Orlando, which the narrator melodramatically figures in allegorical form as a filthy vulture, perching on our hero’s shoulder.

And so Orlando does what any self-respecting gentleman would do under the circumstances, which is he goes to see King Charles (II) and asks to be sent as ambassador to Constantinople. The random arbitrariness of this is a bit funny.

Chapter 3. Constantinople and a sex change

Woolf starts the chapter with another jocose lampoon of the figure of the well-meaning biographer. I suppose this is a pastiche of Restoration or Augustan prose.

It is, indeed, highly unfortunate, and much to be regretted that at this stage of Orlando’s career, when he played a most important part in the public life of his country, we have least information to go upon. We know that he discharged his duties to admiration–witness his Bath and his Dukedom. We know that he had a finger in some of the most delicate negotiations between King Charles and the Turks–to that, treaties in the vault of the Record Office bear testimony. But the revolution which broke out during his period of office, and the fire which followed, have so damaged or destroyed all those papers from which any trustworthy record could be drawn, that what we can give is lamentably incomplete. Often the paper was scorched a deep brown in the middle of the most important sentence. Just when we thought to elucidate a secret that has puzzled historians for a hundred years, there was a hole in the manuscript big enough to put your finger through. We have done our best to piece out a meagre summary from the charred fragments that remain; but often it has been necessary to speculate, to surmise, and even to use the imagination. (p.74)

I.e. it’s a fiction and she’s making most of this up, we get it. The joke is wearing a bit thin.

The narrator gives a caricature exaggeration of the elaborate court ceremonial which has to be performed in each of a dizzying succession of rooms in the Sultan’s palace. This reminded me of the elaborate fictions of Jorge Luis Borges whose first short stories were published only a decade after ‘Orlando’.

There is a very great deal to be said about the legacy of Byzantium, the history of the Ottoman Empire, and the intricacy of British relations with the Sublime Porte – none of which Woolf mentions. Instead she reverts to the only subject she can think of, and has Orlando slipping off at night to mingle with the common people or withdraw to his rooms in order to write poetry. Ah poetry. Yes, poetry. About love, Love, LOVE!

While in Istanbul, Orlando is awarded the Order of the Bath and made a Duke, ceremonies the narrator tells in facetious fragments supposedly written by eye-witnesses (John Fenner Brigge, an English naval officer, and Miss Penelope Hartopp). The narrator excitedly tells us that rumour has it that at the very end of the evening a local woman was hoisted by a rope to his quarters. Next morning his servants find Orlando fast asleep in bed beside a marriage contract to a Rosina Pepita, a dancer, father unknown, but reputed a gipsy, mother also unknown but reputed a seller of old iron in the market-place over against the Galata Bridge.

But what happens next is the Grand Transformation: the real point of these events is that Orlando sleeps for a whole week, sleeps right through a rebellion against the Sultan which Woolf completely fails to describe because she is just not that kind of writer. Instead the text turns into a half-arsed masque featuring the allegorical figures the Lady of Purity, our Lady of Chastity and our Lady of Modesty.

Not only is the supposed poetry of the masque speeches poor, but it feels like it’s from the wrong period. Allegorical masques were all the rage in the court of Charles I, in the later 1620s and 1630s. If we’re in the Restoration era then the fashion is for John Dryden‘s heroic couplets or the acid wit of the Restoration dramatists. But as I’ve made clear, Woolf wasn’t interested in historical accuracy or intellectual precision.

Anyway, when Orlando wakes up after this farrago, he stands naked and is revealed – as a woman! It’s a simple fact: Orlando was a man till the age of thirty, when he became a woman, and has remained so ever since. The narrator comments:

Let other pens treat of sex and sexuality

And they have, Virginia, they have.

You might have thought this transition from male to female would have a fairly big psychological impact on the person in question but Woolf, in a massive own goal, ignores it completely, her heroine takes her transformation utterly in her stride. She’s a woman now, oh well. All the physical changes and any psychological changes are simply unremarked, go completely unexplored. It feels like a massive wasted opportunity.

Instead Orlando decides… to run away to join the gypsies. Seriously. She smuggles herself out of Constantinople and joins a gypsy band based in Thessaly. Even here she doesn’t reflect on the strange turn her life has taken but is soon thinking about ‘Love, Friendship, Poetry’, the only subjects Woolf cares about. We are told that Orlando writes a long blank verse poem about the beauty of nature though, characteristically, we don’t see a line of it.

Orlando takes to rambling about the landscape, glorying in nature but when she tells the gypsies about her huge mansion in England, that her family is 4 or 5 hundred years old and features many dukes and lords, all this alienates the gypsies from her and some of the young ones plan to kill her. But even this doesn’t give rise to any exciting writing, romantic escape etc. Instead one day Orlando simply has a vision of England’s green and pleasant countryside and announces she’s going back to England. So she packs her things and catches a ship home.

Chapter 4. Back to England in the age of Queen Anne

It’s only on the ship back to England that Orlando starts to ponder the differences between men and women. Becoming a woman means she now has to 1) protect her chastity from endless male attention and 2) spend a huge amount of time becoming a woman i.e. dressing, looking and smelling nice to please male preconceptions. It’s a thin yield to such a seismic plot twist. Is this going to be it? Half a page of feminist clichés?

London has changed. It’s been rebuilt since the Great Fire, starring Christopher Wren’s St Paul’s cathedral. She discovers that in her absence relatives have taken out lawsuits against her.

Orlando goes back to her country seat where she’s welcomed by her loyal staff who don’t care whether she’s a man or a woman (again this curious air of complete indifference). She is revisited by the tiresome the Archduchess Harriet Griselda of Finster-Aarhorn and Scand-op-Boom in the Roumanian territory, the one who caused her to flee England in the first place but there is a bit of a surprise: the Archduchess now sheds her dresses and reveals herself as… a man! (p.114) Henceforth to be known as Archduke Harry.

Harry explains that he only dressed up as a woman because Orlando was a man and he was in love with him. He explains that now that Orlando is a woman (which he accepts with as little interest as everyone else) he can reveal his true self and declare he is in love, love being the only subject the narrative knows (well, love and poetry).

So Harry insists on visiting every day, to woo her, to make love to her, to talk about marriage – until Orlando finally manages to drive him away by letting herself be caught cheating at cards.

Sexist stereotypes

Woolf is not just a feminist icon but a queer icon for the lesbian love affair she had with Vita Sackville-West for whom she wrote this farrago. In a way the funniest thing about ‘Orlando’ is the way that, despite its gender-swapping central event, it is in fact deeply conservative in what it says about men and women. It is premised on the notion of fixed gender identities. It is not a hymn to the modern woke idea of gender fluidity: the precise opposite. Woolf conceives of Men having certain fixed and predictable attributes and Women having certain fixed and predictable attributes. What makes her book novel (up to a point) is the notion of her protagonist transitioning from one sex to the other, but the sexes in question remain fixed points, indeed the very notion of there being just two sexes indicates how very old-fashioned the book’s gender politics are.

Thus, as I say, some of the best comedy in the book is entirely unintentional and derives from savouring Woolf’s surprisingly reactionary gender stereotyping.

Her modesty as to her writing, her vanity as to her person, her fears for her safety all seems to hint that what was said a short time ago about there being no change in Orlando the man and Orlando the woman, was ceasing to be altogether true. She was becoming a little more modest, as women are, of her brains, and a little more vain, as women are, of her person.

The truth is that when we write of a woman, everything is out of place–culminations and perorations; the accent never falls where it does with a man… (p.204)

She would burst into tears on slight provocation. She was unversed in geography, found mathematics intolerable, and held some caprices which are more common among women than men, as for instance that to travel south is to travel downhill…

Incidentally, this trope of women being dim occurs in all the Woolf novels I’ve read. Compare and contrast Mrs Ramsay in ‘To The Lighthouse’ who knows nothing about maths or philosophy and has such poor general knowledge that she doesn’t know where the equator is; or the superficial cultural smattering of Mrs Dalloway who can never remember what subject her husband’s select committees are so fussed about.

Anyway, Orlando takes a coach up to her father’s big house in Blackfriars, an area of London. She has come to London looking for ‘life and a lover’ which really does seem to be the only subject Woolf can give her protagonist to think about.

The chauvinism of the novelist

At one point Woolf writes that historians don’t know anything about history. Only the poets and novelists can be trusted to convey a historical period.

To give a truthful account of London society at that or indeed at any other time, is beyond the powers of the biographer or the historian. Only those who have little need of the truth, and no respect for it – the poets and the novelists – can be trusted to do it, for this is one of the cases where the truth does not exist. (p.123)

This is garbage. Poets and novelists really can not be trusted to convey the truth of a society. That is what historians do. Woolf justifies this gibberish by saying that there is no truth in a spirit which would make Donald Trump or Vladimir Putin beam with delight. Well, no, there is a truth, or more precisely, it is worthwhile striving towards a truthful, or less lying and less inaccurate account of a society’s history, and that is what western historians strive to do. Their work should be respected and not dismissed by a flippertigibbet novelist. Woolf’s opinions are starting to strike me as not just debatable, but idiotic.

1712

Suddenly it is 1712 and the reign of Queen Anne. Orlando is bored because she cannot find love, the only subject which Woolf, in a rather patronising sexist kind of way, can give her heroine.

Tell, don’t show

In ‘To The Lighthouse’ all the characters are made to agree that Mr Ramsay is a Great Man, a Great Thinker, an Eminent Philosopher, fiercely clever. And yet he nowhere in the entire book actually says or even thinks anything clever or even interesting. Instead he comes over as a bad-tempered domestic tyrant, a bully with a fondness for stupid jokes.

Similarly, on almost every page of this tedious book we are shown Orlando with pen in hand, Orlando having great thoughts, Orlando writing plays and sonnets, Orlando revising his boyhood poem about an oak tree, Orlando thinking about poetry, and the narrator won’t shut up about Poetry and Love and Poetry and Life and yet… we are not shown a single line of Orlando’s poetry and he or she never, at any point, says anything interesting or funny.

In the Queen Anne section we are told that Orlando ‘wrote some very pleasant, witty verses and characters in prose’ (p.136) but we are not shown them. Why not? You can only conclude it’s because Woolf couldn’t write them or daren’t show us her efforts.

It’s exactly the same way the section featuring Nick Greene tells us he was simply overflowing with wonderful anecdotes about Shakespeare, Marlowe and Ben Jonson, so funny! did all their voices! knew so many hilarious stories! and yet… the book doesn’t contain a single one, in fact has nothing of interest to say about them (or, indeed, any of the many other classics of English literature from later eras which it cheerfully namedrops).

The book is full of promise and hype and absolutely empty of content. It is all mouth and no trousers. One short story by Oscar Wilde has more wit, more intelligence and acuity than these 200 laboured pages. Here is Orlando taking a coach ride with the famous poet Alexander Pope and realising he’s not that funny after all.

A disillusionment so complete as that inflicted not an hour ago leaves the mind rocking from side to side. Everything appears ten times more bare and stark than before. It is a moment fraught with the highest danger for the human spirit. Women turn nuns and men priests in such moments. In such moments, rich men sign away their wealth; and happy men cut their throats with carving knives. (p.130)

This is just bombastic empty verbiage, as is most of ‘Orlando’.

In exactly the same way, Orlando is admitted to a small friendship group of prostitutes – Nell and Prue and Kitty and Rose – ‘and many were the fine tales they told and many the amusing observations they made’ and do you think we hear any of these many fine tales? Not a sausage. It’s so disappointing, this could have been such an enjoyable historical romp. Instead it only serves to reveal Woolf’s imaginative shortcomings.

Back to the plot: the narrator tells us that Orlando took to wearing the clothes of either sex and enjoying the benefits of both genders, ‘and enjoyed the love of both sexes equally’.

So then one may sketch her spending her morning in a China robe of ambiguous gender among her books; then receiving a client or two (for she had many scores of suppliants) in the same garment; then she would take a turn in the garden and clip the nut trees–for which knee-breeches were convenient; then she would change into a flowered taffeta which best suited a drive to Richmond and a proposal of marriage from some great nobleman; and so back again to town, where she would don a snuff-coloured gown like a lawyer’s and visit the courts to hear how her cases were doing,–for her fortune was wasting hourly and the suits seemed no nearer consummation than they had been a hundred years ago; and so, finally, when night came, she would more often than not become a nobleman complete from head to toe and walk the streets in search of adventure. (p.142)

I suppose it’s vaguely interesting that she wears different clothes to reflect her mood, but it’s not really a plot. Right at the end of part 4 Orlando looks out the window on a fine night, thinking how much cleaner and safer the streets are in 18th century London than the narrow dangerous alleys of Elizabethan London. But when the clocks start to toll midnight a big black cloud gathers over St Paul’s and spreads over all of London. The nineteenth century has arrived!

Chapter 5. The nineteenth century

Ignoring the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars, the consolidation of the British Empire and the rise of the working class, Woolf instead focuses on the issue of damp.

With no evidence except her own whimsy, she declares that at the start of the nineteenth century the country suddenly became damp. Clothes became thicker, furniture was covered up, men grew thick whiskers to cope with the damp. Not just clothes but words and concepts became more thickly wrapped. ‘Love, birth, and death were all swaddled in a variety of fine phrases.’ The sexes were forced wide apart. ‘Sentences swelled, adjectives multiplied, lyrics became epics, and little trifles that had been essays a column long were now encyclopaedias in ten or twenty volumes.’

This summary of the heaviness of the Victorian era is possibly the funniest passage in the book because it is the most acute. She is satirising the Victorian values of her own parents.

Back to the massive mansion Orlando goes and there, to my surprise, Woolf does finally share with us some lines of verse Orlando has written.

I am myself but a vile link
Amid life’s weary chain,
But I have spoken hallow’d words,
Oh, do not say in vain!

Will the young maiden, when her tears,
Alone in moonlight shine,
Tears for the absent and the loved,
Murmur– (p.154)

Not good, even as pastiche.

Orlando becomes aware that the new spirit of the age (the nineteenth century) is all for marriage. She feels crushed by Queen Victoria’s famous uxoriousness. She feels she has to give in to the times and take a husband.

Incidentally, the text tells us Orlando has by now been alive some 300 years but is aged only ‘a year or two past thirty’. This premise has such promise for a science fiction or fantasy novel, and yet is so badly let down in the execution of this narrative.

Orlando goes for a walk through her enormous park, decides she is in love with nature, with the moor, the grass, the sky, trips and breaks her ankle. As she’s lying there communing with nature a horse rides up and a gentleman jumps off to help her. It is Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine, Esquire (this is a book of silly names) and a few minutes later they are engaged!

There is a peculiar moment when they both panic that the other is not of the sex they claim i.e. she is a man and he is a woman, but they emerge unscathed and he tells her loads of tales of adventure on the high seas which are told in such a flippant way as not to be remotely funny.

Orlando gets letters declaring all the law cases she’s been involved in since returning from Constantinople are ended and that she is 1) legally a woman 2) the legal owner of the estate. There was never really any jeopardy of this not being the result, and it wouldn’t have mattered if it hadn’t. It’s a whimsical fantasy drowning in its own inconsequentiality. Nothing matters.

A fantastical passage describes Orlando and Marmaduke’s days of mooning around the park and how they use different nicknames to indicate different moods. I suppose this, as when Orlando wears different clothes to indicate different moods (and even genders) is introducing the notion that we all contain multiple identities.

Until one afternoon as they’re lazing about and leaves start falling on them and, as in a fairy tale, they both jump up and run straight to the chapel and insist that old Mr Dupper the chaplain married them at once. So Orlando is married, ludicrously, inconsequentiality.

Chapter 6.

Almost immediately Marmaduke rides off in a storm to captain a boat round the Cape of Good Hope. Orlando goes inside and finds herself writing another verse:

And then I came to a field where the springing grass
Was dulled by the hanging cups of fritillaries,
Sullen and foreign-looking, the snaky flower,
Scarfed in dull purple, like Egyptian girls:–

Bad, isn’t it? Clunky rhythm.

There’s a short passage which is maybe an attempt to justify the way Woolf has covered 300 years of British history without mentioning any history, instead giving a tedious account of her subject’s supposed ‘loves’.

When we are writing the life of a woman, we may, it is agreed, waive our demand for action, and substitute love instead. Love, the poet has said, is woman’s whole existence.

We know that Woolf was a fierce feminist and so presumably this is intended to be ironical or satirical – except that the irony is undercut by the fact that her entire published works tend to reinforce the stereotype that women’s main concern is love, emotions, marriage and children – it’s true not only of this book but of ‘Mrs Dalloway’ and ‘To The Lighthouse’ where the majority of the woman protagonist’s existence and thinking is taken up by endlessly circling thoughts about old loves, new loves, lost loves, found loves, marriage, family and children. We have the evidence of her own novels.

Alternatively, maybe the mind-numbingly narrow subject matter of ‘Orlando’ is itself a sort of satire on the reader’s sexist expectations, gently mocking the readers’ sexist expectations of what a woman’s concerns will be – but I don’t think so. ‘Orlando’ seems, to me, to embody and propagate those very sexist stereotypes, that a sensitive woman has few if any interests beyond love and poetry. What happens at the end of the book? Orlando goes shopping then spends the afternoon wandering round a lovely National Trust property. And this book is claimed to smash gender stereotypes?

Take the fact that Orlando hasn’t noticed the invention of the steam engines or trains. When she asks the servants to prepare a coach to take her to London, they tell her to catch the 11.15 train for Charing Cross station and have to explain the concept of the ‘railway’. Railways have arrived and Orlando hasn’t noticed. Orlando’s complete indifference to history, society, science and technology, engineering, politics, empire, wars and new customs are a badge of pride. Can’t help thinking it reflects the attitude of her creator is, likewise, proud of her ignorance of the practicalities of modern life.

Once Orlando is in London there’s a moderately interesting passage describing how the clean 18th century London she knew has been transformed into the bustling metropolis full of people shouting and the incessant traffic in every direction. As I mentioned at the start, the most profitable way of reading the book might be to just read the passages describing London through the ages and skip all the brain-dead guff in between about Love and Life and Poetry.

In Victorian London Orlando bumps into her old friend Nick Greene, who is now a plump and successful professor of literature. Woolf mocks his kind of mentality by having him still makes the same complaints he made in the Elizabethan era, namely that the golden era of literature is over and the moderns are just shabby hirelings. There is also some satire on contemporary publishing, with Nick giving savvy advice about royalties and buttering up the critics – but surely this is only amusing for readers who think that writers writing books satirising writers writing books is what the world was crying out for, in either 1928 or 2025.

Anyway, Orlando gives Nick the manuscript of the long poem he’s been working on for the last 300 years, about an oak tree, Nick promises to get it published and leaves. So then Orlando wanders the streets of London very, very much as Clarissa Dalloway does in the novel named after her. She is amazed at the concept of a bookshop and the funny blocks of thin paper covered in card, compared to the manuscripts she herself handled and still owns. Books, that is Woolf’s central subject and fascination. Hardly anything else in 300 years of British history registers.

Sort of justifying this, there’s a passage which repeats the central idea of ‘Mrs Dalloway’ and ‘To The Lighthouse’ which is that rational thought about anything doesn’t matter, is irrelevant, can be ignored, because all that counts is Life, the sensation of living which, in practice, means a never-ending stream of consciousness of sensations and perceptions.

It is not articles by Nick Greene on John Donne nor eight-hour bills nor covenants nor factory acts that matter; it’s something useless, sudden, violent; something that costs a life; red, blue, purple; a spirit; a splash; like those hyacinths (she was passing a fine bed of them); free from taint, dependence, soilure of humanity or care for one’s kind; something rash, ridiculous, like my hyacinth, husband I mean, Bonthrop: that’s what it is – a toy boat on the Serpentine, ecstasy – it’s ecstasy that matters. (p.188)

This feels very much like a rationalisation for Woolf’s own mind, with its utter disinterest in politics, history, society, and its endlessly narcissistic obsession with the beauty of its own perceptions, enabled by a small world of servants and lackeys, the butler, the footman, the maid, the cook, the cleaner, the gardener and so on.

It is hard not to read it as Woolf defending her upper middle-class privilege, and justifying her ‘technique’, her entire fictional strategy, which is to gift everything she sees with special value and significance, and to absorb it into the endless flow of her writing.

So here we are at Kew, and I will show you to-day (the second of March) under the plum tree, a grape hyacinth, and a crocus, and a bud, too, on the almond tree; so that to walk there is to be thinking of bulbs, hairy and red, thrust into the earth in October; flowering now; and to be dreaming of more than can rightly be said, and to be taking from its case a cigarette or cigar even, and to be flinging a cloak under (as the rhyme requires) an oak, and there to sit, waiting the kingfisher, which, it is said, was seen once to cross in the evening from bank to bank.

One thing, then another thing, then another, each bright as jewels in the sun, a stream of images washed clean of any thoughts.

Orlando has a baby, a boy though we are given no details or emotion, not a dicky bird about how it feels to either give birth, or the emotions of being a mother. Maybe this is because Woolf never had heterosexual sex and, of course, never had a child. No point attempting a subject area she knows nothing whatsoever about.

There follows an enjoyable sequence of science fiction-like intensity which depicts the passage of the years noticeably speeding up. It happens as Orlando is looking out the window of her Park Lane house and sees a carriage not drawn by horses i.e. a new petrol omnibus. Then she sees the new king draw up, Edward VII. Then she looks again and notices how thin ladies have become, the flapper. And electric lights: now you can see into everybody’s rooms as dusk falls and privacy has been abolished. Men have shed their Victorian whiskers and become clean shaven. Families are tiny.

The speeded-up vividness of this is as good as the long passage about damp setting the tone for the entire Victorian era. They are the two best things in the book.

1928

Then the clock in the room chimes and it is the present day, 11 October 1928! (p.195) Orlando runs outside, jumps into her little car, presses the self-starter, and off she zooms down Park Lane, shouting abuse at drivers who don’t indicate or people who step into the road without looking, till she parks outside her favourite department store, Marshall & Snelgrove’s, and bustles in with a long list of shopping. Here again Woolf celebrates her heroine’s superior ignorance, just as she celebrated Mrs Dalloway’s ignorance and Mrs Ramsay’s vagueness.

In the eighteenth century we knew how everything was done; but here I rise through the air; I listen to voices in America; I see men flying – but how it’s done I can’t even begin to wonder. So my belief in magic returns. (p.196)

She has become Clarissa Dalloway. She has become a lady who lunches. She is 36 (p.198). With her shopping done, she jumps back into her car and hurries off, driving across Westminster Bridge to the Old Kent Road, along it and out into the countryside.

Fragmentation of the self

There follows a very quotable passage about how all of us contain scores of ‘selves’, 60, 70 ‘selves’, associated with all manner of memories, perceptions, neural networks. It’s a stretch to ever say ‘I’. Which ‘I’?

How many different people are there not – Heaven help us – all having lodgment at one time or another in the human spirit?… Come, come! I’m sick to death of this particular self. I want another. Hence, the astonishing changes we see in our friends…These selves of which we are built up, one on top of another, as plates are piled on a waiter’s hand, have attachments elsewhere, sympathies, little constitutions and rights of their own, call them what you will (and for many of these things there is no name) so that one will only come if it is raining, another in a room with green curtains, another when Mrs Jones is not there, another if you can promise it a glass of wine–and so on; for everybody can multiply from his own experience the different terms which his different selves have made with him… (p.201)

Fragmentation of the self, a very modernist trope.

And then there’s an even more quotable passage, a page and a half long, in which Woolf records the internal monologue of Orlando as a dozen or more selves and voices compete with each other, interrupting each other’s thoughts and sentences, competing to be the dominant voice.

Reading this it’s impossible not to remember that its author suffered all her life from severe mental illness which is nowadays diagnosed as bipolar disease. This thought unavoidably dominated my response to the extended passage about the voices squabbling in her head. It is in this hallucinatory state that Orlando walks into the huge park of her beloved country mansion.

And not just the voices in her head, but even the objects in the outside world begin to morph into each other. Everything becomes everything else.

The ferny path up the hill along which she was walking became not entirely a path, but partly the Serpentine; the hawthorn bushes were partly ladies and gentlemen sitting with card-cases and gold-mounted canes; the sheep were partly tall Mayfair houses; everything was partly something else, as if her mind had become a forest with glades branching here and there; things came nearer, and further, and mingled and separated and made the strangest alliances and combinations in an incessant chequer of light and shade. (p.212)

Is this art or madness? Or the artful incorporation of the perceptions of mental illness into narrative form? Does it matter? Is the best response just to go with it?

The last six or seven pages are a long description of Orlando walking through the rooms of her country mansion and all the commentaries tell us that the mansion is identical with Knole, the massive stately home of Vita Sackville-West, Woolf’s lesbian lover who the whole book was inspired by and is dedicated to. So it ends up being a tribute to her lover’s house.

The final long rhapsodic passage also recapitulates many of the memories and moments from throughout the narrative, a pretty stock manoeuvre and, as such, it’s hard to resist its sentimental appeal. Endings are always sad. Most of the way through I hated this book but couldn’t help being moved by the lyrical ending.

Servants

Pretty bored with the endless witterings about love of the main protagonist, I kept myself amused by collecting the names of the servants. I have absolutely no doubt that if I had lived in any of these historical eras, I would not have been a fine lord or lady in smart clothes with a vast unearned income – as most readers of historical fiction and watchers of costume dramas fancy they would have been. No, I’m confident I would have been the lowliest servant at everyone’s beck and call, and so I always sympathise with the often unnamed and always taken-for-granted servants in these bourgeois novels. This one features:

Mrs Grimsditch, the housekeeper

Mr Dupper, the chaplain

Mrs Stewkley

Mrs Field

Old Nurse Carpenter

The little laundry maids and scullery maids, the Judys and the Faiths

The Blackamoor whom they called Grace Robinson by way of making a Christian woman of her

Basket, the butler

Bartholomew, the housekeeper

Louise the housekeeper who spots the holes in the sheets of the royal bed which sends Orlando off to Marshall & Snelgrove’s

The shop assistant at Marshall & Snelgrove’s

Stubbs the gardener

Joe Stubbs the carpenter

Basket the butler has the best name. He sounds like a far more interesting character than the boring null Orlando.

Thoughts

Lacking any psychological depth, any attempt at narrative realism, any historical or political content, it is as an entertainment that ‘Orlando’ must be judged, and on this criterion it utterly fails. For long stretches it is very tiresome indeed. There is no plot to speak of, and few if any insights into anything. Instead you feel like you are drowning in a sea of third-rate pastiche of English prose of its respective eras, and pointless verbiage. All that talk about love and poetry and not a single insight or line worth remembering.

I liked the two passages about damp in the nineteenth century and the speeded-up scene in Park Lane, they had real juice. And then only at the very end, in the passages about multiple selves, did the book really feel like it has anything to say about anything, about the fragmentation of the self which may or may not be a distinctive aspect of modern life, and also hovered between being an artful expression of the modernist sensibility or symptoms of severe mental illness. It’s about the only piece of meat to actually chew on.

Everyone should read ‘Mrs Dalloway’ and ‘To The Lighthouse’ which are masterpieces of the form. I’d  advise you to cross the road to avoid reading this box of tripe.

Credit

‘Orlando: A Biography by Virginia Woolf’ by Virginia Woolf was first published by the Hogarth Press in 1928. Page references are to the 2004 Vintage paperback edition, although the text is easily available online.

Related links

• Orlando online
• The Virginia Woolf Society

Related reviews

• Virginia Woolf reviews
• 1920s reviews
• Seventeenth century reviews – some of the hundreds of issues and ideas from the 17th century which Woolf could have engaged with but didn’t
• Eighteenth century reviews – some of the hundreds of issues and ideas from the 18th century which Woolf could have engaged with but didn’t
• Nineteenth century reviews – some of the hundreds of issues and ideas from the 19th century which Woolf could have engaged with but didn’t