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Virginia Woolf's Orlando - Lecture One (Chapters I-II) (Patreon)

Published:
2023-05-23 19:44:44
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2026-06
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Content

'The moment is brief they sang; the moment is over; one long night is then to be slept by all.'

Today we are diving into Virginia Woolf's Orlando, and we are discussing time distortion, the inadequacy of language, influence, biography, genre, gender, identity, modern literature, and much more. 

Timestamps:

  • 0:00 the publication of Orlando
  • 2:00 what Modernism means to us
  • 5:00 time, consciousness & narrative
  • 9:00 ‘I feel certain that I am going mad again’
  • 12:00 the Modernist’s anxiety of influence
  • 13:00 creativity, multitudes & many selves
  • 14:00 ‘their morals were not ours’
  • 16:00 ‘sunsets were redder and more intense’
  • 17:00 a new name for the novel form
  • 18:00 anxiety about the death of the novel
  • 20:00 ‘who are the judges of reality?’
  • 22:00 on calling Orlando a biography
  • 23:00 gender, genre, and identity
  • 24:00 Knole & the Sackville-Wests
  • 26:00 on the inadequacy of language
  • 27:00 identity & existential crisis
  • 29:00 gender as a social construction
  • 33:00 ‘ransack the language though he might…’
  • 35:00 on approximating other art forms
  • 36:00 Virginia Woolf’s love of photography
  • 39:00 clothing & language as disguising self
  • 42:00 biographer as novelist & lover
  • 44:00 Orlando as fluent, but abstract
  • 45:00 art’s attempt to capture the ephemeral
  • 47:00 the scene of the Great Frost
  • 49:00 mortality, love & art as denial of death
  • 50:00 on our yearning for rebirth
  • 52:00 taking death in small doses daily
  • 54:00 reading, sleeping, dying & being reborn
  • 55:00 how Virginia Woolf read great literature
  • 56:00 on the disease of reading and writing
  • 57:00 clock-time vs timepiece of the mind
  • 58:00 Virginia Woolf’s metatextuality
  • 59:00 inhabiting many selves in great art
  • 1:00:00 ‘the art of poetry in England is dead’
  • 1:01:00 on the pain of living in the past
  • 1:02:00 Orlando begins writing ‘The Oak Tree’
  • 1:03:00 what do you make of Virginia Woolf?

Resources:

  • 'Mr Bennet and Mrs Brown': Virginia Woolf's essay in response to Arnold Bennet's criticism has become a key text in understanding her work and twentieth century literature. The tools of one generation, Woolf argues, are useless to the next. Woolf asks: What is reality? And who are the judges of reality? You can read this essay here. 
  • Exploring Knole: The inspiration for Orlando is open to visitors as part of the National Trust. If you can't make a visit, you may wish to enjoy this video walking through the estate and showing off some of Knole's beautiful galleries.
  • Virginia's Camera: Maggie Humm has an interesting article here about Woolf's love of photography and visual artistic mediums. If you're feeling inspired to learn more about photography, I recommend A History of Photography.
  • Literary Exploration: John Keats' 'Ode to a Nightingale' and 'Ode on a Grecian Urn', along with sonnets 130 and sonnet 20 from Shakespeare, pair nicely with our discussion. And if you’re interested in exploring some of the work that Orlando is reading, you might also wish to check out the writings of Sir Thomas Browne.
  • Film Appreciation: If you are interested to learn more about Vita and Virginia, this film, starring Elizabeth Debicki and Gemma Arterton, explores their relationship. 
  • 'One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman': In this interview, Simone de Beauvoir explains the meaning of this iconic statement. She says there is no biological or psychological destiny, and being a woman is the result of history.
  • Biography: For those reading Hermione Lee's excellent biography of Virgina Woolf, I recommend reading chapter twenty-nine ('Censors'), which details the composition and publishing of Orlando.

Reading Assignment:

Congratulations on breaching Virginia Woolf's Orlando. The next discussion will be on chapters three to four. This takes us up to page 131 in the Oxford World's Classics edition.

Questions to Consider:

1) What do you make of Virginia Woolf’s writing style?

2) Have words ever failed to communicate your feelings?

3) Do you ever feel like the art of poetry is dead?

4) What resonates most with you in Orlando?

And please do share with us your impressions and favourite passages from the beginning of Virginia Woolf's Orlando.

Happy reading, everybody!

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Comments

Brock Eldon

1) What do you make of Virginia Woolf’s writing style? The first Woolf I encountered was in a first year "Forms of Fiction," as an undergraduate in Canada. From that moment, I have described Woolf's prose as the most "heavenly" I have read. It's at once so airy and ornate and so study: it's so beautiful read aloud. "Orlando" is a first time read for me ("To the Lighthouse" was the work I was describing before) . . . I do notice some differences. Mainly, I see the prose in "Orlando" mirroring the language of the time that Woolf (as Orlando's biographer) is concerned with. It's been a delight reading through favourite poems by Donne and Pope and Tennyson again, seeing little glimpses of their style throughout the novel's different sections. 2) Have words ever failed to communicate your feelings? As a writer, yes: I can confirm this absolutely . . . there is an interesting problem that arises given the breadth of English lexis, and its "mutability": I can phrase things 2-3 different ways and they might all sound "fine," but fail to capture the FEELING that I was initially aiming toward - words do not so much "fall short" as "transform." 3) Do you ever feel like the art of poetry is dead? Yes, frequently. I do not like contemporary poetry. I could go on for some time about this, like Mr. Greene in "Orlando": there is something about the art of poetry today that we have forgotten and that seems to me to be the "texture of sound," if anything. When I think of my favourite poets (Dickinson, Hopkins, Heaney, to name a few), I think about the "crunchiness" (for lack of a better word) of their language. The sounds of the words themselves are stimulating - and they keep one engaged with the poet. There is a Pixar-like "shine" or "sheen" to the poetry of our moment for me to take it very seriously. Likewise, I think it goes without saying: contemporary poetry is overrun with repetitive political messaging. I do not wish to belabor the point, but I do find much of this "activism" in the poetry found today in Poetry Magazine, for instance, very obnoxious, and even less than skin deep. 4) What resonates most with you in Orlando? At this point: the travelling between locales and across time, including cameos from so many of my literary heroes from the past; this is simply for a delight for the student of literature. This is the most playful I have seen Virginia Woolf be - which is refreshing, and encouraging, given the melancholy so often associated with her life and work.

Laura DiFrancesco

First, I really truly enjoy your guidance through each book. I especially enjoy the recommendations for supplementary reading and ideas and themes you walk us through. 1) What do you make of Virginia Woolf’s writing style? Per your recommendation, I first read A Room of One’s Own, which I **LOVED**. So, I was so excited to start Orlando. I loved Woolf’s writing style in A Room of One’s Own (AROOO). I didn’t love (or at times, like) her writing style in Orlando. But for the themes and similar prose, it feels like they’re written by completely different authors. Where AROOO was a beautiful journey of prose and ideas woven together, Orlando felt all over the place and so disjointed. I enjoyed the themes, but the approach did not suit me. I didn’t enjoy being in and experiencing the scenes presented like I did in AROOO. I felt like the satire fell flat and the love letter was ineffectual with the sporadic and disjointed plot. I did enjoy a number of passages, the themes, and societal commentary: I just didn’t enjoy the delivery. My favorite thing she did in her writing is the jumps through time, which were fun to discover and see. I also really liked how forward thinking and ahead of her time Virginia was. I do want to explore some of her other works to see if I enjoy her writing style in her other works. 2) Have words ever failed to communicate your feelings? Absolutely. They are one of many tools of communication. 3) Do you ever feel like the art of poetry is dead? No, I’ve never thought it’s dead. I don’t think it’s dead, and I don’t think it will die. 4) What resonates most with you in Orlando? I really love when Orlando decides to write what he wants to write. I also enjoyed the social commentary of the impacts of being a woman later in the book (I.e. expectations, safety concerns, etc.). Question for fellow book club members, which of Virginia Woolf’s novels would you recommend the most for reading? I’d like to read another of her works next.