Book Review - Orlando by Virginia Woolf

 Orlando: a biography by Virginia Woolf

London: Penguin Books, 2006 (First published 1928)        ISBN 9780141188294

I found this book a hard slog. I haven't read any Woolf before, which is a failing, and so Orlando has remedied that. But I'm not sure I really understand what Woolf was trying to achieve with this book. There is no doubt that it was in it's time a piece of experimental literature, with the main character living for 400 years, changing sex, meeting Kings and Queens and writers, without the outside world seeming to notice or care that he/she is not aging, or even too concerned with the changing of sex.

The question then becomes is there a message beyond the fantastical nature of our hero/ine? I'm still grappling with that. Woolf is certainly writing about love, and betrayal of that love, about the expectations that society places on women (but not necessarily men), about the fashions that come and go within society, and the worth of a good name, and of conspicuous consumption versus a simple life. But there are two other themes that particularly stand out for me, that both weave their way through this novel.

The first is a bit of a treatise on English Literature. Through Orlando's life, it is a story of demise and decay, even though there is a surface growth and abundance. From the peaks of Shakespeare and Marlowe, Pope, Dryden and Addison, the writing life of England descends in Victorian times to a bookshop full of tomes that to Orlando mean very little compared to those greats. He/she spends their entire life working on their poem "The Oak Tree" which, from youthful scribblings grows throughout Orlando's life to become a great poem, eventually published to great praise, but as Orlando states at the very end of the book "What has praise and fame to do with poetry?...Was not writing poetry a secret transaction, a voice answering a voice?" The poem she has written is her answer to the voice of her home, trying to respond to the life she had led.

Which brings us to the second theme I'd like to mention - a question that Orlando asks him/herself throughout the book - "What is life?". Orlando constantly muses over this problem, and keeps coming back to literature, as the real world seems to provide much noise and motion, but little light. Literature too, is disappointing - Orlando reads and reads, and yet always feels that the truth that allegedly lurks within great literature is eluding her.

Much as the acknowledged greatness of this work eluded me. There is definitely some good writing in this book, but as an overall coherent whole, it failed for me. But maybe that's the point - after all....what is life?

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell