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Orlando – a study guide

plot, characters, video, resources, further reading

Orlando (1927) is one of Virginia Woolf’s lesser-known novels, although it’s critical reputation has risen in recent years. It’s a delightful fantasy which features a character who changes sex part-way through the book – and lives from the sixteenth to the twentieth century. Using this device (which turns out to be strangely credible) Woolf explores issues of gender and identity as her hero-heroine moves through a variety of lives and personal adventures.

Orlando starts out as an emissary to the Court of St James, lives through friendships with Swift and Alexander Pope, and ends up motoring through the west end of London on a shopping expedition in the 1920s. The character is loosely based on Vita Sackville-West, who at the time was Woolf’s lover. The novel itself was described by Nigel Nicolson (Sackville-West’s son) as ‘the longest and most charming love-letter in literature’.

Virginia Woolf

Orlando – plot summary

The novel tells the story of a young man named Orlando, born in England during the reign of Elizabeth I, who decides not to grow old. He is briefly a lover to the decrepit queen, but after her death has a brief, intense love affair with Sasha, a princess in the entourage of the Russian embassy. This episode, of love and excitement against the background of the Great Frost of 1683, is one of the best known, and is said to represent Vita Sackville-West’s affair with Violet Trefusis.

Following Sasha’s return to Russia, the desolate, lonely Orlando returns to writing The Oak Tree, a poem started and abandoned in his youth. This period of contemplating love and life leads him to appreciate the value of his ancestral stately home, which he proceeds to furnish lavishly and then plays host to the populace. Ennui sets in and a persistent suitor’s harassment leads to Orlando’s appointment by King Charles II as British ambassador to Constantinople. Orlando performs his duties well, until a night of civil unrest and murderous riots. He falls asleep for a lengthy period, resisting all efforts to rouse him.

Upon awakening he finds that he has metamorphosed into a woman—the same person, with the same personality and intellect, but in a woman’s body. For this reason, the now Lady Orlando covertly escapes Constantinople in the company of a Gypsy clan, adopting their way of life until its essential conflict with her upbringing leads her to head home. Only on the ship back to England, with her constraining female clothes and an incident in which a flash of her ankle nearly results in a sailor’s falling to his death, does she realise the magnitude of becoming a woman; yet she concludes the overall advantages, declaring ‘Praise God I’m a woman!’

Orlando becomes caught up in the life of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, holding court with the great poets (notably Alexander Pope), winning a lawsuit and marrying a sea captain. In 1928, she publishes The Oak Tree centuries after starting it, winning a prize.

Study resources

Orlando – Oxford World Classics edition

Orlando – Wordsworth Classics edition

Orlando – Vintage Classics edition

Orlando – free eBook edition

Orlando – audio book (abridged)

Orlando – a film screenplay

Blogging Woolf – web site

Virginia Woolf – biographical notes

Orlando – Sally Potter’s 1992 film adaptation

Selected Essays – by Virginia Woolf

Hyper-Concordance to Virginia Woolf’s works

Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain

Orlando – Sally Potter’s film archive

Virginia Woolf at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Virginia Woolf at Mantex – tutorials, web links, study resources

Orlando – film version

1992 film adaptation by Sally Potter

See reviews of the film at the Internet Movie Database

Principal characters

Mont Blanc pen – the Virginia Woolf special edition

Virginia Woolf podcast

A eulogy to words

Further reading

Bell, Quentin. Virginia Woolf: A Biography. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972.

Lee, Hermione. Virginia Woolf. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997.

Marsh, Nicholas. Virginia Woolf, the Novels. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998.

Mepham, John. Virginia Woolf. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992.

Reinhold, Natalya, ed. Woolf Across Cultures. New York: Pace University Press, 2004.

Rosenthal, Michael. Virginia Woolf: A Critical Study. New York: Columbia University Press, 1979.

Sellers, Susan, The Cambridge Companion to Vit=rginia Woolf, Cambridge University Press, 2010.

Showalter, Elaine. ‘Mrs. Dalloway: Introduction’. In Virginia Woolf: Introductions to the Major Works, edited by Julia Briggs. London: Virago Press, 1994.

Woolf, Virginia. The Common Reader. New York: Harvest Books, 2002.

Zwerdling, Alex. Virginia Woolf and the Real World. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986.

“I feel certain that I am going mad again.”

Original inspiration

Vita Sackville-West

Knole – Kent, UK

365 rooms, 52 staircases, 12 entrances and 7 courtyards

Other works by Virginia Woolf

Jacob’s Room (1922) was Woolf’s first and most dramatic break with traditional narrative fiction. It was also the first of her novels she published herself, as co-founder of the Hogarth Press. This gave her for the first time the freedom to write exactly as she wished. The story is a thinly disguised portrait of her brother Thoby – as he is perceived by others, and in his dealings with two young women. The novel does not have a conventional plot, and the point of view shifts constantly and without any signals or transitions from one character to another. Woolf was creating a form of story telling in which several things are discussed at the same time, creating an impression of simultaneity, and a flow of continuity in life which was one of her most important contributions to literary modernism.
Buy the book here

Between the Acts (1941) is her last novel, in which she returns to a less demanding literary style. Despite being written immediately before her suicide, she combines a playful wittiness with her satirical critique of English upper middle-class life. The story is set in the summer of 1939 on the day of the annual village fete at Pointz Hall. It describes a country pageant on English history written by Miss La Trobe, and its effects on the people who watch it. Most of the audience misunderstand it in various ways, but the implication is that it is a work of art which temporarily creates order amidst the chaos of human life. There’s lots of social comedy, some amusing reflections on English weather, and meteorological metaphors and imagery run cleverly throughout the book.
Buy the book here

Virginia Woolf is a readable and well illustrated biography by John Lehmann, who at one point worked as her assistant at the Hogarth Press. It is described by the blurb as ‘A critical biography of Virginia Woolf containing illustrations that are a record of the Bloomsbury Group and the literary and artistic world that surrounded a writer who is immensely popular today’. An attractive and very accessible introduction to the subject.
Buy the book here

Virginia Woolf links

Virginia Woolf – life and works

The Bloomsbury Group

Virginia Woolf: Selected Essays

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One Response to “Orlando – a study guide”

1. Study guides, more added to Mantex site « Blogging Woolf says:

   14 February 2013 at 10:55 pm

   [...] Orlando [...]

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