"Surely, since she is a woman, and a beautiful woman, and a woman in the prime of life, she will soon give over this pretence of writing and thinking and begin to think, at least of a gamekeeper (and as long as she thinks of a man, nobody objects to a woman thinking). And then she will write him a little note (and as long as she writes little notes nobody objects to a woman writing either) and make an assignation for Sunday dusk; and Sunday dusk will come; and the gamekeeper will whistle under the window--all of which is, of course, the very stuff of life and the only possible subject for fiction."

I also hated Lady Chatterly's Lover, but I could never have been this funny in saying so. 😂

"But love--as the male novelists define it--and who, after all, speak with greater authority?--has nothing whatever to do with kindness, fidelity, generosity, or poetry. Love is slipping off one's petticoat and--  But we all know what love is."

Kind of wish Virginia Woolf had written more stuff that was just to amuse her girlfriend. With her reputation for being literary and difficult, she doesn’t get enough credit for being sarcastically witty.

Orlando was a big lift, but one which will linger with me. It is clear the ways modern trans writing is informed by this work--Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl as the err example from recent. While I laughed aloud only a handful of times, one of my predominant impressions is that Virginia Woolf is quite funny. Woolf has deep knowledge of both politic and literature spanning the 1500s to the 1920s, but--in an incredible choice of feminist storytelling--moves this traditionally central, masculine narrative structure to the periphery, having the dynastic churn of power serve as sardonic, comedic relief while whispering hints as to the narrative's current timeline. Ultimately, Orlando's personal ennui about him/herself as a poet is the central focus of the book.

This play in gender and time is foundational to the ultimate impression of Orlando, which is--of course--that everything is gender: darkness and light, marriage, job/social role, genre, poetry and prose, socioeconomic class, life and death, time, nature herself, structures of belief, etc. are all subverted and transmogrified in this work. All of these delve in the realm of performance and are and are not "real" when set on various axes of "reality." Before Judith Butler, Virginia Woolf, a British woman no less, was characterizing gender in a way that inextricably linked feminist and trans thought while remaining absent of the trappings of trans storytelling we find ourselves in today. She told this story on her terms and thereby left the true determinations of Orlando's gender to the "psychologists and biologists." Discarding these concerns allowed her to truly grapple with the reality of gender.

The elements of magical realism provide whimsy throughout. Some characters die and age, others do not, some cross dress, others truly change genders, a lawsuit stretches 200 years, trumpets of truth emerge inexplicably, and following a five-page stream of consciousness perambulation through prose, Virginia Woolf as biographer spells out--obviously--that this means Orlando has had a son. This last element is something the "biographer" does quite regularly in their asides, to either elucidate prior happenings, defend Orlando's behavior, or highlight specific choices of storytelling. These interludes served to queer the genre of Orlando while also adding intimacy to the storytelling in these concentric meditations on craft.

I'm quite happy to have read and been in conversation with Orlando, and found it an excellent book club pick given its rich text. More can, has, will be written on this book, and I highly recommend trying to give it a read.