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ORLANDO SUMMARY Meet Orlando, living in England in 1586. He is young, attractive, noble, and playing a game called "attack a severed head" when we meet him. Being a noble, Orlando gets to meet Queen Elizabeth, and being tight with the Queen (not to mention good-looking and wealthy) gives Orlando some major credibility when chatting up the ladies. He does a lot of flirting until he falls in love with a Russian princess whom he decides to call Sasha. However, Sasha takes his heart, stomps on it with steel-toed boots, and before Orlando knows what hit him, she high tails it back to Russia. Orlando goes back to his big castle to mope and write poetry. Eventually, Orlando decides to invite an actual poet to his house to get some honest feedback on whether or not he's got any actual writing skill. After six weeks of hanging out with the poet, Nick Greene, Orlando gets a very public answer. How public? Basically, Greene creates a South Park-style spoof of Orlando’s life and publishes it – not quite what our hero was hoping for. Orlando reads the thinly-veiled spoof and promptly burns everything he’s been writing. He saves one piece called “The Oak Tree,” then orders a pack of elk-hounds, claiming that he is "done with men." Orlando tries to snap out of his blue funk by redecorating and refurnishing his whole castle, but pretty soon he figures out that the whole effect is lost without actual people to put inside his newly redesigned abode. Clearly, the solution is to start partying. Orlando invites all the neighbors over, but then decides to chill by himself and work on "The Oak Tree." After the same strange-looking woman walks back and forth in front of his window a couple times, Orlando realizes he's being stalked and invites the stalker inside for a cup of tea. Turns out the stalker is the Romanian Archduchess Harriet Griselda. Orlando falls in love; well, we (the readers) think it's love, but the narrator tells us that it's actually just lust. Orlando's not interested in anything long term, but unfortunately, Harriet is. Realizing he's a wanted man (pun intended), Orlando skips town. He skips town…all the way to Constantinople, where King Charles has appointed him Ambassador. Next thing we know, Orlando is thirty-years-old and a woman. After cruising for a while with some gipsies, Orlando goes home to England, where she learns some of the advantages, limitations, and annoyances of her new gender. As soon as she gets home, she gets slapped with a bunch of lawsuits that all stem from the fact that she used to be a man. (Basically, at this point in time women weren't allowed to own the clothes on their backs, let alone their own castles.) The Archduchess Harriet shows up at Orlando’s castle. Orlando invites her in, turns around to get some wine, and then turns back to find the Archduchess is now the Archduke Harry (there's nothing like a sex change to spice up a story). The Archduke declares his love, but Orlando doesn't want it. After some painfully awkward exchanges, Orlando finally manages to get rid of Harry. She also decides that she wants "life and a lover," and promptly heads to London to find both. After arriving in London, Orlando parties with the other members of the nobility, but is soon dissatisfied and unfulfilled. She turns to the city’s literary circles in a quest to find great wit, spending time with the writers Pope, Addison, and Dryden, before realizing that, even though they may have great wit, they’re not exactly great people. After more wanderings, a cloud descends upon London and at the stroke of midnight, the nineteenth century begins.

Welcome to the Victorian Age. Orlando isn’t too happy in this age of repression; she constantly feels pressure to yield to the “spirit of the age,” which we learn involves getting married. Since there are no eligible men out there, Orlando turns to nature instead. In the process, she twists her ankle and meets Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine, Esquire (Shel for short). Two minutes later, they’re engaged. Great, except that Shel spends his time sailing around Cape Horn. After some happy couple time, the wind changes, the two get married quickly, and Shel takes off. We should also mention that the lawsuits’ verdicts restored all of Orlando’s property to her. Remember that poem “The Oak Tree”? Orlando finishes it, hops into her car (invented when we weren’t looking), and drives off to London in search of someone willing to read the manuscript. She finds her old buddy Nick Greene, who is now a respected literary critic. He thinks the poem is wonderful and promises to get it published. Next, the novel’s style morphs into stream-of-consciousness. The novel ends with the image of Orlando in her backyard, baring her chest and shouting for her husband.

ORLANDO THEMES THEME OF IDENTITY Orlando ages, travels, and changes gender. So what makes this a novel about one person? It isn't about just one person: Orlando reflects herself in Chapter 6, there are thousands of selves presented on the written page. People change from moment to moment. But there is a core, to both Orlando and to Orlando. The core is "The Oak Tree" − Orlando's dreams and reflections. It is the inner life of the character that gives Orlando her identity, not the social trappings of her clothing or her body. Even though Orlando is a novel about shifting identities, Woolf acknowledges that you can't entirely throw off what you're born with. Orlando's changing gender creates restrictions: it changes her sexual desire, and forces her to deal with discrimination that she never encountered as a man.

THEME OF LIFE, CREATION, AND EXISTENCE Always a theme with Virginia Woolf. And not in subtle ways, either. At one point Orlando explicitly wants "life and a lover." Orlando’s journey throughout the novel oscillates between a desire to die and a desire to live. The character experiences many highs and lows throughout the novel, and must confront the difficulties of reconciling past and present, the constraints of gender, and the demands of society.

THEME OF MEMORY AND THE PAST After "The Oak Tree" has been published in Chapter 6, Orlando is at loose ends. Random memories start floating up in her mind, and she can't keep track of their sequence. While she was still working on "The Oak Tree," there was an order to the novel that arose from the need to get Orlando's character from unsuccessful male writer to successful woman writer. Once "The Oak Tree" has been published, that linear narrative ends. We are left with Orlando's disordered memories and reflections. For Woolf, individual memory is episodic and random. What imposes order on memory is the process of writing a narrative. The past only takes on a linear structure in retrospect, when you're constructing a story from it.

THEME OF SOCIETY AND CLASS Orlando's character is a tool to expose the shallowness of social life and its restrictions. Being of high birth, Orlando has a lot of social mobility, and can move freely amongst both the upper and lower classes. As a woman in England, she experiences the high excitement of London society – until she realizes that it is essentially hollow and insubstantial. Woolf also raises the issue of gender and class. It turns out that, when Orlando's a man, he has a thing for women of lower classes that gets him in trouble with his patron, Queen Elizabeth. But there's a neat reversal later in the novel, when female Orlando befriends London prostitutes whom she might have patronized when she was a guy. Together, they form a community of women that operates outside hollow London high society.

THEME OF GENDER Orlando does all kinds of work with gender. The novel explores social mores about marriage, children, and appropriate occupations for women. While Orlando must face increased discrimination from poets and society once she becomes a woman writer, she also learns the value of writing from nature. Orlando's writing as a man is pretentious and abstract, and it seems to be the quality of women's writing (in this novel) that brings out essential truths from nature and from lived experience. (Check out "Characters" for more on this subject.)

THEME OF LITERATURE AND WRITING Orlando? He (and then she) is a writer. Everything else is subordinate to this first aspect of his identity. But Orlando's ability to write depends on social conditions and on her relations with people around her. In a way, this novel works as a dramatization of Virginia Woolf's1929 essay on women and writing, "A Room of One's Own," which argues that a woman requires a steady income and a room of her own to be able to write. In other words, it's not just a matter of natural talent – even Shakespeare's sister would need economic freedom and leisure time to produce anything. And English women didn't regularly have either of those things, argues Woolf, until the late 19th/early 20th centuries. This is right around the time that Orlando is getting busy with writing. Coincidence? We think not.

THEME OF TIME Time is incredibly subjective in Orlando. The only way we can reliably tell the passage of time is based on changes in the monarchy, new inventions, and the biographer flat out telling us that time has passed. If we did not have these clues, we would be dependent on Orlando’s sense of time, which sometimes places more importance on a single minute than a single decade. This reflects the way we actually experience time; an hour with a pretty girl may seem like a minute, while spending a minute with your hand on the stove may seem like an hour.

THEME OF LOVE We've already brought this out a bit in our "Character Roles" section on Shel and Sasha, but this novel has very clear ideas about what constitutes love. Love that's about pompous poetry and romantic looks? Not real. Love that's about mutual enjoyment of one another's company and a deep natural sympathy between people? Real. And while Orlando does find love as a woman with a man, Orlando leaves open the possibility that this real love is most natural between people who share the same gender.

THEME OF MARRIAGE We have a utopian model for a marriage presented in Orlando between Shel and Orlando. Both are androgynous and free-spirited, and neither seems to exert authority over the other. Woolf seems to believe that marriage is a kind of necessary evil, something that is more meaningful socially than spiritually. That said, she seems to argue that we can make the best of it by marrying people we really love. The best part of such an unconventional marriage appears to be, for Orlando, the fact that it's not restrictive sexually: she enjoys being able to love other people while still having the social privileges of marriage.

THEME OF MAN AND THE NATURAL WORLD Orlando's first love is nature. When she changes gender and needs to get back to the basics, the first thing she does is travel with a gypsy band to Italy to live amidst the mountains and fields. Nature is Orlando's touchstone for what is important in life. Her struggle as a writer is to find the language appropriate to represent it. Orlando observes early on that green in nature and greenin literature are two different things. This distinction, in Orlando's world, proves to be a bad one. She wants to make real green and literary green as close as they can be, using poetic language to evoke what nature is like.

ORLANDO CHARACTERS ORLANDO Character Analysis Orlando is many things: poet, patron of the arts, ambassador, man, woman, and temporary coma patient. But one thing Orlando is not is a character with a trajectory easy to map from one chapter to the next. We can tell from the beginning lines that finding a "character" for Orlando is going to be tricky: He – for there could be no doubt of his sex, though the fashion of the time did something to disguise it – was in the act of slicing at the head of a Moor which swung from the rafters. (1.1) What's strange about this opening? First, wouldn't it make more sense, when launching into a biography, to give the name of the protagonist before using pronouns? And we can tell gender is going to be a huge deal because the phrase assures us that it isn't. Why specify that "there could be no doubt of his sex" unless there is or will be huge doubt about it at some point in the future? And what about the Moor's head Orlando is happily slashing? This detail is tantalizing because it seems to tell us something about when our protagonist lives. "Moor" is an early modern term for people (often of Arab descent, often Muslim) of North Africa, who eventually came to occupy much of Spain from the 8th through the 11th centuries. But really, "Moor" is unspecific as an ethnographic or historical term. While the term may call to mind Morocco (northern Africa) and Andalucía (southern Spain), "Moor"

came to be used more generally (and pejoratively) to mean "dark-skinned" and/or "Muslim" during the Renaissance. So we don't know where in Africa Orlando's family might have encountered this "vast Pagan" (1.1). Plus, the fact that the text doesn't seem interested in revealing this information lets us know that Orlando might not be your typical biography. What "Moor" brings to mind is Shakespeare's The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice. This reference is probably the most famous use of the word "Moor" in the English language. We already know that Orlando's situation in the novel will probably be situated in literary history. We're not dealing with facts, and Virginia Woolf isn't trying to disguise it. The other thing we learn immediately is that Orlando comes from an aristocratic – and violent – lineage: "Orlando's fathers had ridden in fields of asphodel, and stony fields, and fields watered by strange rivers, and they had struck many heads of many colours off many shoulders" (1.2). All of this warfare – fighting religious wars against the Muslims in Spain and northern Africa, and then on to the Crusades, and then participating the Hundred Years War – sets the reader up to believe that this character (and the novel as a whole) is going to be a novel in the heroic tradition. In fact, our narrator tells us this fact outright: Happy the mother who bears, happier still the biographer who records the life of such a one! Never need she vex herself, nor he invoke the help of novelist or poet. From deed to deed, from glory to glory, from office to office he must go, his scribe following after, till they reach what ever seat it may be that is the height of their desire. Orlando, to look at, was cut out precisely for some such career. (1.2) Woolf is clearly playing with the chicken-or-the-egg problem of what a biographer does. Is the task of the writer to "follow after" reality, narrating events without "the help of novelist or poet"? Maybe that'd be the job of, say, a traditional biographer. Think about the biographies that you have come across about important historical figures. It seems unlikely that the biographer would begin by demanding that her subject "must" go "from deed to deed, from glory to glory," as the narrator requires of Orlando. In other words, even while pretending that Orlando's life is being recorded after the fact (i.e., while the novel pretends to be a historical account), the language used to introduce Orlando is performative. These passages create an image of what a man "cut out precisely for some such career [of heroism]" would look like. He would slash at a Moor's head, he would have heroic ancestors, he would possess "red [cheeks] covered with peach down" (1.2). This is no historical record: this is precisely the type of rhapsody that the biographer dismisses. The biographer's intent, to present an heroic image in keeping with Orlando's age, station, and heroic fate, upsets itself in the same paragraph: "Directly we glance at eyes and forehead, thus do we rhapsodise. Directly we glance at eyes and forehead, we have to admit a thousand disagreeables which it is the aim of every good biographer to ignore" (1.2). There's a circular logic at work in this passage. Orlando's forehead and eyes make the biographer stray dangerously close to poetry ("eyes like

drenched violets" [1.2]), but of course, it is the biographer who presents us with these poetic features in the first place. This narrative is becoming an Escher painting: we can never trust which way is up or what comes first. Which does come first: the biographer's poetry or Orlando's appearance? Orlando's poetry-inducing face is also a symptom of Orlando's poetryproducing nature. Here is where we learn that Orlando will never be cut out for the type of Julius-Caesar-Napoleon-Bonaparte-conquering-hero that the biographer initially seems to establish. Because the conclusion of this second, paragraph leaves Orlando "[sitting] down at the table, and, with the half-conscious air of one doing what he does every day of his life at this hour, [taking] out a writing book labelled 'Aethelbert: A Tragedy in Five Acts,' and [dipping] an old stained goose quill in the ink" (1.2). Orlando is a writer. That mean's Orlando's "biographer" needs to find a way to describe – in writing – the creative experiences of writing. Orlando is like painting a person in the act of painting: how can you use language to evoke the experience of using language? Orlando is a parody of biography, and not only because there are no four-hundred-year-old gender-switching tree lovers waiting to be discovered in this world. The joke at the heart of Orlando is Woolf's use of "biography" (which is all about narrating events in a person's life) to describe what is not eventful (i.e., sensory experience). Anyone who's ever suffered from writer's block knows that writing can be challenging. We can understand the biographer's frustration once she decides that Orlando has this fatal flaw, fluency with language.

Orlando and Biography Biographies are generally written after the subject of the book has already made a name for herself. You don't read many biographies of people who haven't done anything. If you pick up Doris Kearns Goodwin's famous book on Lincoln, Team of Rivals, you're checking it out because you know that 1) Lincoln's awesome, and 2) Goodwin's offering to tell you how he got that way, how he showed the leadership that made him such a pivotal figure in American history. And then – there's Orlando, which pretends to be a biography about a person we have never heard of. What's useful about framing this novel as "biography" is that it grounds Woolf's meditations on truth in literature. Biographies are supposed to be true, but Woolf is challenging us to question whether or not Orlando is a true story. Can you tell important truths in fiction? Can you narrate the truth of human life and experience through fiction? (By the way, check out "In a Nutshell" for more on Orlando's real life association with Woolf's friend and lover, Vita Sackville-West.) Orlando starts out with the potential to mimic conventional biographies: our hero's from an aristocratic family, and has a heroic temperament, although happens to be unlucky in love. But Orlando's role as a traditional subject for biography keeps getting undercut: one of the great moments in his career arrives in Chapter 3, when he is made a duke and appointed Ambassador to Turkey. But instead of providing the exact dates of his public office or anything that you might expect to find in a traditional biography, our narrator reports that "the revolution which broke out during his period of office, and the fire which followed, have so damaged or destroyed all

those papers from which any trustworthy record could be drawn, that what we can give is lamentably incomplete" (3.1). What follows is a confused account of Orlando receiving the dukedom, narrated in part through letters from two (hilarious) English observers. At the point when the novel elevates Orlando to public office, what we get is a letter from Miss Penelope Hartopp to a friend in Tunbridge Wells and a diary from naval officer John Fenner Brigge. This is a way of reminding the reader that Orlando's life isn't being recorded just because he was a duke or an ambassador. Orlando's real life can be found in the "biography's" least eventful passages, in its meditations on social mores,...