whatcathyread

Last Christmas my big sis’ bought me a lovely hardback called What Writers Read: 35 Writers on their Favourite Book. Virginia Woolf’s Orlando was chosen Turkish-British novelist Elif Shafak (the most widely read female author in Turkey, I’m told).

I’d read Woolf before. With an English degree it’d be remarkable if I hadn’t, given her status as one of the most influential novelists of the 20^th century, co-founder of the famous “Bloomsbury Group”, and a distinguished journalist, critic and feminist. Yet (confession time) her major novels – Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927) and The Waves (1931) – hadn’t impressed me much.  Was I too young to appreciate them properly? I decided to have a crack at Orlando.

Orlando (1928) is a ‘biography’ inspired by Woolf’s close friend, the Hon. Victoria Mary Sackville-West, who was also a poet and novelist.  The novel follows the career of the aristocrat Orlando, starting with his life as a young nobleman in the Court of Queen Elizabeth I and ending four centuries later as a woman writer in the early 20^th Century. Yes, Orlando not only ages exceptionally slowly, but part way through the story our ‘hero’ falls asleep as a man and wakes up as a woman.

It’s a playful fantasy that contains a serious message. “The change of sex, though it altered their future, did nothing to alter their identity”. Orlando is the same person but no longer has the same opportunities:  “I shall never be able to…lead an army, or prance down Whitehall on a charger, or wear seventy-two different medals on my breast. All I can do…is to pour out tea and ask my lords how they like it.”

And there lies the rub. Male-Orlando had adventures: chased women (including a Russian princess), skated on the Thames during the great freeze, and was appointed Ambassador to Turkey. Female-Orlando sits at home writing poetry, while her husband has adventures, going off to sail around Cape Horn. Now, male-Orlando aspired to be a poet, so in sense this is real freedom: “she could write, and write she did. She wrote. She wrote. She wrote”.  The problem is “sitting in a chair and thinking” is not all that engaging for the reader, something Woolf acknowledges in one of many ironic asides that pepper the book.  “If then, the subject of one’s biography will…only think and imagine, we may conclude that he or she is no better than a corpse and so leave her.”

But the novel doesn’t end there.

I get that Woolf is blurring the boundaries of form and gender, but sometimes the asides are too long or too arch, and the story just seems to peter out. My overall impression was of reading an in-joke between friends, wonderful if you’re part of the group, not-so-good otherwise.

Rating: * Not for me (but worth a try)

PS. I much preferred reading Woolf’s essay, A Room of One’s Own (1929). It’s based on two lectures she delivered at Newnham College and Girton College, Cambridge. In one memorable passage she imagines Shakespeare had a “wonderfully gifted sister” who tries to get into theatre by standing by the stage door (as Shakespeare did). Instead of being hired, she’s preyed upon by the stage manager – Nick Greene, who appears as a character in Orlando – falls pregnant and winds up committing suicide.  Not a cheery hypothesis…but Woolf certainly knows how to construct an argument. A Room of One’s Own is acknowledged as a feminist classic