Virginia Woolf, Orlando: A Biography (1928)

 

Virginia Woolf, one of the founders of the movement known as Modernism, is one of the most important woman writers in English. Her "stream-of-consciousness" essays and novels provide an invaluable insight into both her own life experiences and those of women at the beginning of the twentieth century. Her most famous works include Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), The Waves (1931), and her most recognized work, A Room of One's Own (1929).

Orlando: A Biography, published in 1928, was not Woolf's most famous work, but it was one of her most intense considerations of gender. Through the life of the extraordinary character Orlando, Woolf examines the meanings of masculinity and femininity as these definitions changed in Europe over the course of four hundred years. In tracing those changes, Woolf presents a feminist overview of history from the days of Elizabeth the First to the end of World War I. Orlando, who was modeled on Woolf's close friend Vita Sackville-West, goes from being a young man in Queen Elizabeth's court to a love affair with a Muscovite princess; from Ambassador Extraordinary to encounters, now as Lady Orlando, with the famous English writers Pope, Addison, and Swift; finally, Orlando experiences childbirth.

Questions to Think About:

 

Why did Woolf write this book? Why did she write this story in the way she did? Why not write a story that is not fanciful?

What are the events that define Orlando's life?

What identifies Orlando as male at the beginning of the book? How does the reader come to view that definition differently later in the book, when Orlando looks back at being male once Orlando has become female?

What identifies Orlando as female when Orlando becomes a female? Does that definition change throughout the book?

What is Woolf saying about what is essentially male and essentially female? To what extent does Woolf identify differences between men and women as a result of biology (sex)? To what extent does Woolf identify differences as the result of social practice (gender)?

How do the people around Orlando respond to the fact that Orlando lives 400 years and changes sex? Why do they behave this way?

What causes the change in sex? How do you know Orlando changed?

How, according to Woolf, do men and women experience the world differently?

How might men and women readers have read this book differently, or would they read it the same way? Do you think Woolf was conscious that she would have been speaking to both male and female audiences? Does she seem conscious of different ways her audience might respond to her work? More to the point, what audience did she write this for?

Using the novel Orlando, explain some of the differences between men's and women's historical experiences. What would Woolf provide to challenge assumptions that women are physically and intellectually inferior?

Resources for studying feminist writer Virginia Woolf and the original novel version of Orlando:

A brief biography of Virginia Woolf

The Virginia Woolf Web

Kelly Tetterton's "Virginia Woolf's Orlando: The Book as Critic" and "Paperbacks as an Area of Bibliographical Study: The Case of Virginia Woolf's Orlando, two online essays dealing with Woolf and Orlando

E. Dejones's Woolf Resources Guide

Locate information on Woolf and her Modernist cohort on the Modernism Timeline, 1890-1940

George Landow's Victorian Web will also place Woolf in context.

Kathleen V. Donnelly's Virginia Woolf and The Bloomsbury Group (1907-1915) site is a discussion of her in-progress dissertation on the subject.

The Orlando Project at The University of Alberta provides an integrated history of women's writing in the British Isles.

Further resources for studying Sally Potter's Orlando (1993), a film contemplation of the novel:

British filmmaker Sally Potter made a film adaptation of Woolf's novel in 1993; while it follows some of the contours of Woolf's novel, it is in fact a further contemplation of the novel rather than an adaptation of it. Think of it as the analogue to a piece of music that is a "Variation on a Theme," rather than a filmed version of the novel. Nonetheless, there are some interesting online resources about the film and it is worth watching even though it does not replace reading the book, which is much funnier.

 

The Internet Movie Database files for Orlando, including plot summary, quotes from the movie, and other stuff.

Roger Ebert's Review of Orlando from the Chicago Sun-Times, 9 July 1993.

Joe Brown's review of Orlando from the Washington Post, 25 June 1993.

Rita Kempley's review of Orlando from the Washington Post, 25 June 1993.

The University of Alberta's Film Studies Resources on the Internet pages offer a heap of resources.

Women in Cinema, a reference guide to Women's resources and readings on women in film.

Prepared by Professor Catherine Lavender for History 182 (Women's History and Feminist Theory), The Department of History, The College of Staten Island of The City University of New York, Fall Semester 1997.

Last modified: Monday 13 October 1997