Orlando by Virginia Woolf


 It was brave of Virginia Woolf, in the wake of Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, to try something completely different in her next novel, Orlando. Nothing like what had come before, it is a historical fantasia, and it is hard to imagine that Woolf didn't have fun writing it. Alas, however, it's not as much fun for the reader as it must have been for the author.

There is humor and sparkling prose. It's Virginia Woolf we're talking about, after all. But the humor isn't always as humorous as it should be, and the prose, at times, doesn't sparkle brightly enough to hold one's interest. That's my take, but what do I know? It was extremely popular in its day, so much so that it made Virginia, Leonard, and the struggling Hogarth Press financially solvent for the first time.

The novel is groundbreaking in its treatment of gender, but in terms of style, it seems less interesting than the narrative experiments Woolf had pulled off successfully in her previous two novels. I look forward, as my Woolfathon continues, to moving on to The Waves and The Years which, if memory serves, are more formally interesting.

(I enjoyed the discussion of Orlando on the podcast One Bright Book.)

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