Orlando: A Biography

1928, 1960 Signet Classics edition
Virginia Woolf
Orlando: A Biography
Original price unknown, bought used for $1.95
Worn and waterlogged paperback
B-

This is a "biography" in the sense that there are elements of the life of Virginia's lover Vita Sackville-West, although Vita never changed her sex or lived in four different centuries.  The novel is lighter and more humourous than usual for Woolf, although still a bit too "artistic" (obscure and meandering, like Break of Day by Colette) for me.  I think that it generally improves as it goes along, and the description of the over-fecundity of Victorian England, where ivy grows everywhere and every woman has fifteen to eighteen children by age 30, is great.

The book is of course most notable in the history of LGBT fiction.  (The Afterword by Elizabeth Bowen, understandably for that time period, doesn't dwell on this, beyond saying that the story was inspired by a "romantic friendship.")  Published the same month that copies of The Well of Loneliness were seized (with an obscenity trial the next month), it dares to show a character who, with no guilt and few repercussions, changes from male to female and then alternately assumes either identity through clothing.  Orlando also has affairs with both men and women throughout her long life.  (She's 16 in 1588, 36 in 1928.)  Perhaps because the novel is fantasy rather than reality, or perhaps because Woolf has more prestige, she and Orlando get away with it.