I usually give star ratings to help myself know how I felt about a book at the time I read it. It’s more for myself than for others. I do not feel capable of giving a star rating to Orlando because I am so conflicted about it, so I am writing this instead. 

 

I loved reading Orlando—Woolf’s prose is alive and often very funny, and she accomplished her satirical examinations of gender and class with deftness and beauty. There is a reason Woolf is so beloved, and it is on full display here. But I was stopped in my tracks by the book’s very first line [content warning for racism here]—“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.” 

 

We begin with a white British nobleman disfiguring a Black man’s severed head. I was shocked by the amount of dehumanization on display from the get-go. I had heard before that Virginia Woolf’s writing is “of it’s time” and that it doesn’t hold up to “today’s standards” but I didn’t realize what these euphemisms referred to. The only other book I’ve read by Woolf is To the Lighthouse, and I loved it. I don’t remember any overt racism in that book but I read it my freshman year of college and am a white person. I thought I might have missed something in that work as well due to my own ignorance and biases, and, sure enough, when I looked it up it seems I missed a lot. I want to return to To the Lighthouse sometime soon to see how I feel about it now that I’m in my later twenties. 

 

Orlando is a sharp critique of gender and class structures, and their relationship with time. Woolf also uses the n-word liberally and propagates Orientalist stereotypes. If one was being extremely charitable in interpretation of her work, one could say that the racism of the characters also reflects how race is structured/how it relates to time, just like gender and class. Except there are no characters of color who are ever given pathos like the main characters. At the same time, there is another example in the novel of dead people who are dehumanized in Britain’s Great Frost during the reign of James I. I want to take a look at parts of this passage for a moment— 

 

“The Great Frost was, historians tell us, the most severe that has ever visited these islands. Birds froze in mid-air and fell like stones to the ground. At Norwich a young countrywoman started to cross the road in her usual robust health and was seen by the onlookers to turn visibly to powder and be blown in a puff of dust over the roofs as the icy blast struck her at the street corner. The mortality among sheep and cattle was enormous. Corpses froze and could not be drawn from the sheets. It was no uncommon sight to come upon a whole herd of swine frozen immovable upon the road. The fields were full of shepherds, ploughmen, teams of horses, and little bird-scaring boys all struck stark in the act of the moment, one with his hand to his nose, another with the bottle to his lips, a third with a stone raised to throw at the ravens who sat, as if stuffed, upon the hedge within a yard of him. The severity of the frost was so extraordinary that a kind of petrification sometimes ensued; and it was commonly supposed that the great increase of rocks in some parts of Derbyshire was due to no eruption, for there was none, but to the solidification of unfortunate wayfarers who had been turned literally to stone where they stood. The Church could give little help in the matter, and though some landowners had these relics blessed, the most part preferred to use them either as landmarks, scratching-posts for sheep, or, when the form of the stone allowed, drinking troughs for cattle, which purposes they serve, admirably for the most part, to this day. [Passage in which Woolf writes about the frozen River Thames] Near London Bridge, where the river had frozen to a depth of some twenty fathoms, a wrecked wherry boat was plainly visible, lying on the bed of the river where it had sunk last autumn, overladen with apples. The old bumboat woman, who was carrying her fruit to market on the Surrey side, sat there in her plaids and farthingales with her lap full of apples, for all the world as if she were about to serve a customer, though a certain blueness about the lips hinted the truth. ’Twas a sight King James specially liked to look upon, and he would bring a troupe of courtiers to gaze with him. In short, nothing could exceed the brilliancy and gaiety of the scene by day.” 

 

I can’t work on writing this much longer, as I have to go to work, but this passage in conjunction with the book’s themes and its opening kind of boggles my mind. We have corpses being used for sport and entertainment in both parts. I don’t think Virginia Woolf sees the mutilation of the “Moor” in the same light as she sees the bumboat woman. I could be wrong. 

 

In this book, Woolf often makes fun of groups of male writers and their genius. Orlando goes and hangs out with a group of prostitutes and finds their talk much more engaging than she finds the talk of the “wits” of the day. This scene made me wonder how Orlando saw herself and her white collection of authors, the Bloomsbury group. Did she ever stop to think how insular their whiteness could be? Did she even see them all as white, with her antisemitism? She loved her husband Leonard Woolf, from what I understand of her own history, but she was also notably antisemitic. 

 

The contradictions are making me think it would be super interesting to see a person of color rewrite Orlando. Maybe this is a thing that’s already been done. If it has, I will have to look it up later when I am not rushing to get to work. Obviously, my ramblings here should not be taken as some definitive guide for anyone else. I hope you get something out of them if you’ve had similar thoughts to mine about Virginia Woolf’s writings. I’m just thinking of how horrible H. P. Lovecraft was as a person and how I’m so grateful that works by N. K. Jemisin, Cadwell Turnbull, and other Black writers who have inspired by his mythos exist. I hope that is true for Virginia Woolf’s works. 

 

Humans, race, sociology, linguistics, all incredibly complicated subjects. If someone told me that they never wanted to read Woolf because she is racist, I’d back them 100% and understand. I loved this book. I am still learning many things about race and I seek to be anti-racist, but I may fail. Not up to me. I actually spent a chunk of time writing this “review” (Idk what this is as this point lol) trying to look up if I should capitalize “white” when talking about race or not. I got tons of different opinions from lots of news sources and Black writers. I decided not to capitalize it right now because that is the standard convention I was taught in college. But isn’t it an interesting political and personal question to ask why that is? Isn’t it an interesting political and personal question to interrogate the social dynamics Woolf is presenting here? I didn’t even talk about how Orlando is also a seminal work of trans and queer literature (one could include lesbian in this as well, but is that erasure of bi people? I’m bi, I don’t want to erase myself). How does transness and queerness interact with race when some of the greatest fighters we’ve ever had for trans rights were Black trans women? 

 

Some people may think I’m overthinking this here, and maybe I am, but reading this reminded me why I love literature. In many ways Orlando is ahead of its time, and I loved our nonbinary, wild protagonist written as a love letter to Woolf’s female lover. Love love love. So much love here. And it’s really racist. No stars. I want to read more. Bye. 

There is no doubt that this is a work of a literary master. It is impeccably written. It has great and important insights into gender. However, it personally did not strike anything in me. Orlando is such an insufferable character; I found he/she hard to empathize with at all. In the end, it felt like the themes of the story would be better written about in an essay than a novel (though perhaps would not have been accepted in the 1920s). Overall, it's just not the book for me.

I wanted to like this really badly but alas it is dry as fuck. i’d apologize to virginia woolf for saying that but she still owes me for several hours of awful class discussions on To The Lighthouse. let’s call it even 

incredibly dense, wordy, garrulous — almost always on purpose, but there’s a certain point where the page-long paragraphs start blurring together despite the satirical point in having them. small parts of this got a chuckle out of me, I’ll give it that, but in general I had to push myself to pick it up again 

I think this being billed as a capital q queer book is a bit of a trap: it is undoubtedly a book about a queer person directly engaging with their gender identity & performance, but you are also inundated with a lot of pithy jabs at multiple eras of eng lit and British society between the interesting gender bits. I’m sure people can write really interesting things with gender and the Victorians or something from this but as a casual read I think you could find much more engaging queer material. 

I also just think the book is boring. As someone who spent much of her eng degree focusing on many of the poets & lit trends woolf has a go at here, i expected to get more kicks out of it. oh well

overall: a snooze, if a culturally important one. i don’t think i like virginia woolf

really intriguing blurry realism/magical realism. it was both stream of consciousness and history, frivolous and profound at the same time (reminding me a bit of the picture of dorian gray). I thought that it would be more didactic than it was re experiencing the world as two different genders but it was not and I think that was particularly effective at creating the generally fluid, dreamlike and playful yet serious atmosphere to the book.

05/02/2025

so enjoyable! so silly! so camp! playful and fluid and thoroughly queer. queer temporality is an interesting lens through which to look at this book. forgot how violent and casual the racism is in places though so that was a bit of a downer

very funny and absolutely ahead of its time i really quite enjoyed this by the end

this would not have taken as long for me to finish if i did not get engrossed in playing pokemon for half a month oops. also definitely picked up by the third chapter the first two kind of stalled me a bit

I started out not really enjoying Orlando, both the book and the character, and it took me some 70-80 pages to feel engaged with the novel. But I'm glad I stuck with it as by the end I was engrossed with the novel's exploration of gender, identity, art, and society. A perfect example of 

"trust the process" and keep reading. 

Could've done without the random racism though.