Five-minute digest
Orlando: A Biography
Summary
Orlando is a comic, fantastical biography of an English nobleman and poet who lives from the last years of Elizabeth I to the eleventh of October 1928, ageing only about twenty years and becoming a woman along the way. The book opens with the sixteen-year-old Orlando slashing at a Moor's head in the attic of his family's enormous house in the country. Queen Elizabeth visits, makes him her Treasurer and Steward and favours him at Whitehall. Under James I the Thames freezes in the Great Frost, and at the carnival on the ice Orlando falls in love with Sasha, a Muscovite princess who skates beside him; she promises to run away with him, but on the night of the thaw she sails for Russia, and he watches the ice break up with drowned people and wreckage on it. Orlando falls into a trance of seven days and wakes changed. In the second chapter he turns to solitude and literature, reads Sir Thomas Browne, writes many verse dramas, and invites the poet Nick Greene to his house; Greene mocks the age of Shakespeare, takes his pension, and lampoons him in a satire. Orlando burns all his work except a poem called The Oak Tree, furnishes his house with immense extravagance, and to escape the attentions of a towering Archduchess Harriet asks King Charles II to send him as Ambassador to Constantinople. There, in the third chapter, he is made a Duke, marries (it is later claimed) a dancer called Rosina Pepita, and during a rising sleeps another seven days; while the allegorical ladies Purity, Chastity and Modesty are driven off by trumpets of Truth, Orlando wakes, at about thirty, a woman. She lives for a time among gypsies in the hills, cannot share their contempt for her four hundred years of ancestors, and sails home to England. In the eighteenth century, in petticoats aboard the Enamoured Lady, she learns how clothes change both how a woman is treated and how she sees. She faces lawsuits over her sex and estates, is courted by the Archduchess, now revealed as the Archduke Harry, entertains Pope, Addison and Swift, and in breeches walks London at night with the young woman Nell. The nineteenth century arrives as a cloud of damp, ivy and crinolines; obliged by the spirit of the age to take a husband, Orlando breaks her ankle on the moor and is found by the sea captain Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine, whom she marries before he sails for Cape Horn. In the final chapter she finishes The Oak Tree, meets Nick Greene again as Sir Nicholas, a powerful critic who arranges its publication, wins a prize, bears a son, and in 1928 drives a motor car and shops at Marshall and Snelgrove. At midnight, as she waits under the oak, Shelmerdine's aeroplane comes down and a wild goose springs up over his head. The Hogarth Press published the book in October 1928, with photographs of portraits and of Woolf's friend Vita Sackville-West as illustrations.
Top Lessons
Biography as comedy
The narrator poses as a sober biographer with documents and portraits, then complains when the documents are burnt or the subject only thinks. Woolf mocks the confident lives-and-letters biography of her father's generation and asks what a life really consists of.
The spirit of the age
Each century in Orlando has its own weather: the Great Frost, the clarity of the eighteenth century, the damp and ivy of the Victorians, the electric speed of 1928. The book treats literary and social history as climates that press on every person who lives in them.
Clothes and the self
After the change Orlando remains, the narrator says, the same person, but skirts change how Captain Bartolus treats her and how she looks at the world. The book presents two views, that clothes mould us and that something deeper chooses the clothes, and lets them argue.
One poem over three centuries
The Oak Tree survives the burning in Chapter 2, travels with Orlando to Turkey and back, and is finished in the twentieth century. Woolf makes the slow labour of one poem the thread of a life and asks what fame adds to it.
Verified Quotes
Frequently cited
“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.”
“For the philosopher is right who says that nothing thicker than a knife's blade separates happiness from melancholy”
“This extraordinary discrepancy between time on the clock and time in the mind is less known than it should be and deserves fuller investigation.”
Frequently cited
“Orlando had become a woman--there is no denying it. But in every other respect, Orlando remained precisely as he had been.”
Frequently cited
“Vain trifles as they seem, clothes have, they say, more important offices than merely to keep us warm. They change our view of the world and the world's view of us.”
“Life? Literature? One to be made into the other? But how monstrously difficult!”
Frequently cited
“And the twelfth stroke of midnight sounded; the twelfth stroke of midnight, Thursday, the eleventh of October, Nineteen hundred and Twenty Eight.”
Medical Lens
Orlando is fantasy, and its medical moments are comic or symbolic. Twice Orlando falls into a deathlike trance of seven days, once after Sasha's desertion and once in Constantinople; in the first, household remedies (barking dogs, drums, a gorse bush under the pillow, mustard plasters to the feet) fail to rouse him, and he wakes graver and with a clouded memory, and the second ends in the change of sex. Woolf uses the trance as a threshold between selves rather than as a case. The Elizabethan sections speak in the period's humoral language of melancholy, and the narrator cites the old idea that extremes of feeling are allied to madness. In Chapter 6 a midwife announces the birth of Orlando's son in a single comic paragraph. Readers interested in sex and gender medicine should note that the book treats the change as a fantastic event and pointedly leaves it, in the narrator's words, to biologists and psychologists; it is not a clinical account.
- Chapter 1
Orlando's sudden falls from joy into melancholy on the frozen Thames, and the narrator's reflection on happiness, melancholy and madness.
- Chapter 2 (opening)
The seven-day trance after Sasha's flight, the failed folk remedies, and Orlando's altered memory on waking.
- Chapter 3
The second trance in Constantinople, a doctor's useless remedies, and the waking change of sex announced by the trumpets of Truth.
- Chapter 6
The midwife Mrs Banting announces the safe delivery of Orlando's son, in a passage the narrator hurries past.