My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This is my first time reading a book by Virginia Woolf. I have previously tried to read Mrs Dalloway, but found it difficult to finish. Orlando read differently, and I really enjoyed it. The book is a biography of this person named Orlando. He grew up as a boy in a rich household that allows him to meet beautiful Russian princesses. He goes through Elizabethan England and finds himself on an adventure at sea. Later he wakes up in a gypsy commune in Turkey, as a woman. Female Orlando returns to Victorian England, and falls in love with dashing Shelmerdine, of ambiguous gender himself. The story ends in 1928. This absurdist tale highlights different gender roles through history, and to me, the fluidity of gender identity. I particularly liked how Woolf subverts gender stereotypes.
Favourite line:
“…there is much to support the view that it is clothes that wear us and not we them; we may make them take the mould of arm or breast, but they mould our hearts, our brains, our tongues to their liking.” p167
