I’m not much of a lover of Virginia Woolf’s works, but was aware ‘Orlando’ had a different feel to it, and quite frankly it was unlike anything else I have read by Woolf and I loved it! It is a story that explores history and posterity, gender and sexuality and has the beauty of nature and literature at its heart, with the central idea of feeling out of place in ones own time. ‘Orlando’ explores the transgender identity before it was a coined concept, the young Elizabethan nobleman Orlando waking up one day to find he had become a woman, and being completely acceptant of it, continuing to enjoy life, with no question raised from those around him. How this transformation occurred and the passage of time in ‘Orlando’ is confusing, the fictional biography of the eponymous protagonist spanning across 400 years and ending in 1928. It also wrestled with ideas such as identity in history, and also acceptance of sexuality and following Orlando’s transition the realisation of the limitation of being born a woman from the perspective of one who used to be a man was such a powerful feminist discussion and passage of the book. The appreciation of poetry and literature across the novel was a delight and as typical of Woolf the prose was beautiful, though in this case more so than anything I have read by her before. I shall leave on a line that really touched me from the beginning pages: “Letters and nature seem to have a natural antipathy; bring them together and they tear each other to pieces” (Pg 13)