I’m am going to be very honest and very brief about my thoughts on this book: I don’t think that I am going to be reading any more of Virginia Woolf’s books. I’ve come to the conclusion that they aren’t for me… Which is a shame because I really do want to love her writing and enjoy her stories, but I just don’t. And I’m not going to force myself to read books that I know that I’m not going to enjoy, there is no point…

Spanning three centuries, the novel opens as Orlando, a young nobleman in Elizabeth’s England, awaits a visit from the Queen and traces his experience with first love as England under James I lies locked in the embrace of the Great Frost.

At the midpoint of the novel, Orlando, now an ambassador in Costantinople, awakes to find that he is a woman, and the novel indulges in farce and irony to consider the roles of women in the 18th and 19th centuries. As the novel ends in 1928, a year consonant with full suffrage for women. Orlando, now a wife and mother, stands poised at the brink of a future that holds new hope and promise for women.

This book was just so weird… Don’t get me wrong, the concept of this book is brilliant, with a man waking up in a woman’s body and then learning to navigate through society, coming to terms with her gender and sexuality; Woolf was definitely writing well ahead of her time, but the way that the story was executed wasn’t very good. Some people love this book, but for me, it was just something that I found very hard to find the motivation to read. Once I had finished a chapter, I would have to look at SparkNotes and read a chapter summary and then write them on a post-it note and then stick it in the book. (I’m only doing that  because I had to read Orlando for university, so I had to make notes on it so I actually knew what was going on.)

“A woman knows very well that, though a wit sends her his poems, praises her judgment, solicits her criticism, and drinks her tea, this by no means signifies that he respects her opinions, admires her understanding, or will refuse, though the rapier is denied him, to run through the body with his pen.”

― Virginia Woolf, Orlando

Like I said before, this book has a great concept, but the story seemed to go on and on and on. I know the book spans 400 years but that doesn’t mean that the reading experience had to mirror that. In Orlando, going through different sexes, having relationships with all sides of the gender spectrum is not a big deal, it happens like the sun rises in the morning and sets in the evening. Men dress as women, women dress as men and then there are also people who live forever and can change their sex, so there is definitely some element of fantasy in the book, but I feel like it was Woolf expressing her own sexual fluidity through her characters.

Overall, this wasn’t a very enjoyable book, and it took me a month to read because I couldn’t get into the storyline and Woolf’s ‘stream of consciousness’ way of writing just isn’t for me.