Orlando : the Woolf classic 94 years later - Beatriz Victoria Balboa The Tiffin Girls' School

I was never one to read classical literature as a child - the long, drawn out expressions about wrinkled, white aristocrats stirring unnecessary problems within their privileged lives never really appealed to a middle class twelve year old girl living in the early twenty first century, and even to this day, seeing myself as a self- proclaimed lover of literature, I still see no reason why it should.

“Why should we bother learning about the sexist, racist views of past writers considered ‘great’ simply because they’re old?” was a question I constantly asked myself for the first fourteen years of life, to the point where I would not let any script with the word “Shakespeare” on it come within a fifty mile radius of me. No matter how hard I tried, I could never understand the media’s seemingly mindless obsession with classical literature and how it ‘impacted our modern world’, with its outdated views on concepts that would only be relevant to me if I owned a time machine.

However, despite the old- fashioned views held by many during Virginia Woolf’s writing and publishing of her fourth novel, Orlando, Woolf’s funny, perceptive and timeless ideas about gender, freedom and the female mind hold up eternally 94 years after its publishing in a modern age where discussions about gender and equality are no longer taboo. 

The story follows Orlando, an entitled nobleman living in Elizabethan England on his arduous and unconventional search for true love, who miraculously changes gender halfway through the novel and later explores the difference between living as a woman or man in their aristocratic life. Although the satirical tone of the beginning of the novel leaves way for some witty comments on British high society, the character of Orlando is still presented to the reader as a poet, a prince, and at heart, a hopeless romantic. Through this, our fondness for the contemplative writer only grows through the story, as many times in the novel, Orlando falls in love with people perceived to be the same gender as them, one example being her relationship with Sasha: a Russian woman whom she falls in love with as a man, but is still infatuated with after her return to England as a woman - 

“Though she, herself was a woman, it was still a woman she loved; and if the consciousness of being the same sex had any effect at all, it was to quicken and deepen the feelings she had as a man”

This seemingly modern LGBTQ+ idea, that the gender of the person you fall in love with is simply an external characteristic of them and does not factor into true infatuation, presents itself through an almost 100 year old book, in a year where women in the United Kingdom had only just been allowed to vote, and translates flawlessly into our modern world, where more and more LGBTQ+ relationships are being represented in media as simply "normal" relationships. As well as this, many believe the character of Orlando herself to be transgender due to her ability to be both ambiguously male and female, and despite her physical change, none of Orlando’s loved ones “showed an instant’s suspicion that Orlando was not the Orlando that they had known”, further exemplifying the idea that the gender of a person should not impact who they are underneath: a timeless and intriguing idea that is still being explored in many pieces of literature and media 94 years after Orlando's publishing. 

But, other than LGBTQ+ ideas presented in the novel, Orlando is also widely considered a femminist classic, due to the changing of gender and lifestyle Orlando experiences in the second half of the book, providing a witty social commentary on the gendered conventions of Elizabethan England, some of which are still relevant today. When Orlando returns to England from Turkey in her new body, assuming "she/her" pronouns “out of convention”, she observes and judges the lifestyles of being any gender, as “she was a man, she was a woman, she knew the secrets, shared the weaknesses of each'', such as being resentful for never again being able to experience traditionally masculine affairs, some being having the ability “crack a man over the head”, or “draw [her] sword and run him through the body”, as she disliked the sexist and unfair power imbalance given to men at the time, believing being a woman gave her a lack of freedom. However, after giving it more thought, she “thanked Heaven that she was not prancing down Whitehall on a war- horse, or sentencing a man to death”, as not experiencing these “power hungry” affairs allows her to fully enjoy nature’s pleasures in her boundless free time and truly experiencing freedom, giving a new, more appreciative, and proud perspective on being a woman, as she writes, it is “better to be quit of manly desires, if so can fully enjoy contemplation, solitude, and love.” This optimistic view of womanly fates provided a new perspective which I, as a reader, had not once considered before reading this novel, and helped me view my world as a growing woman in an ever- evolving light. 

The intriguing concepts presented and ideas explored in this classic, but modern novel have the ability to be explored endlessly through Woolf’s artistic use of language and charming metaphors, building a romantic, contemplative atmosphere within the entire novel, helping the reader closely examine the details of life without it becoming confusing or unclear. With this, she makes seemingly broad and vague concepts, such as the human nature of memory, seem intricate, endless, and poetic. 

Due to Woolf’s contemporary ideas flowing through her unique and distinct writing style, I would highly recommend this life- changing tale to anyone seeking a romantic and reflective story that flawlessly explores the boundless complexity of life, love and gender, changing my idea on what "classical literature" can, and should be.