Virginia Woolf 3: Orlando

Virginia Woolf wrote Orlando, a gender-defying historical romance, in 1927, when her intimate friend and lover Vita Sackville-West left London to join her diplomat husband Harold Nicholson in Tehran. Orlando is a love-story set across 300 years of English history, starting in the Elizabethan court and finishing in 1920s England. It features an irresistible protagonist who is both woman and man; a writer and a lover; an aristocrat and a commoner. The novel gifts us a joyful romp through English literature, with lots of cameos from writers who have appeared on the Secret Life of Books.

Orlando is also a meditation on the nature of novels themselves, explaining how Woolf’s Modernist style emerges from the great literary works of the past.

Woolf said that she wrote Orlando “sitting over the gas in her sordid room” while Vita capered about in the sunny climes of the middle east. But that sordid room gave rise to one of English literature’s great queer love-stories and reconstructions of Woolf's beloved city of London, across three centuries of transformation.

Jonty and Sophie pursue many eccentric critical hunches, explaining why you can't read Orlando without knowing about solar eclipses, the mini ice-age of the late seventeenth century, Lytton Strachey's semen - or Jonty's favorite hobby-horse, the decline of the English aristocracy.

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