ORLANDO: A BIOGRAPHY BY VIRGINIA WOOLF “I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realizes an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don’t have complete emotions about the present, only the past.” — Virginia Woolf
Recognized as one of the greatest 20th-century modernist writers, Virginia Woolf was born Adeline Virginia Stephen in 1882 to a large, wealthy family in London. Her family’s wealth allowed her to pursue a career in the arts, which eventually brought her to King's College London where she studied classics and history. Woolf was greatly affected by the death of her parents and two of her siblings, which led her to numerous depressive episodes; episodes which would grow to shape her novels.
ature in gender and transgender studies this novel has been adapted many times; most well-recognized is Sally Potter’s 1992 film, Orlando, which gave inspiration to the 2020 Met Gala theme. According to Vita’s son Nigel Nicolson, Orlando, inspired by Woolf’s love for Vita, was the “most charming love letter in literature.” In the novel, she “explores Vita, weaves her in & out of centuries, tosses her from one sex to another, dresses her in furs, drops a veil of mist around her.” Placed as our seminal protagonist of Orlando, Vita takes on a multitude of personalities as Orlando journeys through nearly 300 years of history. In one notable moment, the previously male Orlando awakens from his sleep, naked in his bed, as a woman. Orlando looks at her new body in the mirror and remarks “Different sex. Same person.” Orlando carries on as a woman for the remainder of the novel and must adapt to now living at this time in history, powerless, a change which is especially highlighted when compared to having lived as a man before.
When Woolf and her remaining siblings purchased a house in the Bloomsbury area of London, she met the Bloomsbury Group, a set of English writers, intellectuals, philosophers, and artists well known for their libral views of sexuality. Vita Sackville-West, a member of the Bloomsbury Group, became close friends with Woolf, which led to a decade-long sexual and romantic relationship between the two. Woolf and Vita’s relationship has been memorialized in Woolf’s 1928 novel, Orlando: A Biography, which Woolf specified in one of her journals.
Woolf uses fashion to express the difference between men and women at this time, beyond just physicalities. When Orlando goes back to England from Constantinople, she is outfitted in a seventeenth century dress. Fashion reflects and represents societal views and understandings of gender- the dress that Orlando wears as a woman is constricting and hard to move in. She is restrained, very much like the women in the seventeenth century (and for the majority of history).
This classic novel, often regarded as Woolf’s best and most well-known, discards our understanding of time and gender, replacing them with disjointed timelines and gender-bending. It follows Orlando, an adventerous poet who lives for centuries, and changes sex from male to female. The novel begins with the famous line “He, for there could be no doubt about his sex...” only to leave us spending the rest of the novel doing just that: doubting his sex. Remembered as a feminist classic and recognized by scholars as a key piece of liter-
One night, Orlando dresses herself as a man and finds herself reverting back to her traditional male manner-
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