Orlando (1928) (edit title/settings)

Ridiculously Simplified Synopsis edit see section history

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Summary edit see section history

Write a summary of the plot or a synopsis of this book.

Characters/People edit see section history

• Orlando: Orlando is born into a rich family. He is incredibly handsome, particularly his shapely legs. His first admirer, Queen Elizabeth, takes him into her court. From there his life of privilege leads him on a sexual journey of exploration.
• Sasha: A princess in the entourage of the Russian embassy. And a very talented skater.
• Mr. Pope: In real life, Alexander Pope, a poet of the eighteenth-century, was famous for his polemical satires and mock-epics, "The Dunciad" and "The Rape of the Lock." In the novel, Orlando places Pope on a pedestal when he meets him at a gathering of "brilliant" people.
• Nick Greene: A famous poet who visits Orlando but suddenly becomes very off-putting and even causes Orlando to reconsider his writing talent.
• Bartholomew: Orlando's servant through life.
• Mr. Dupper: Add a description of this character.
• Mrs. Grimsditch
• Mr. Addison
• James
• John Dryden
• William Shakespeare
• Shelmerdine
• Christopher Marlowe
• Ben Jonson

Quotes edit see section history

• “For once the disease of reading has laid hold upon the system it weakens it so that it falls an easy prey to that other scourge which dwells in the ink pot and festers in the quill. The wretch takes to writing.”

• “By the truth we are undone. Life is a dream. 'Tis waking that kills us. He who robs us of our dreams robs us of our life.”

• “She had thought of literature all these years (her seclusion, her rank, her sex must be her excuse) as something wild as the wind, hot as fire, swift as lighting; something errant, incalculable, abrupt, and behold, literature was an elderly gentleman in a grey suit talking about duchesses.”

• “One thought only disturbed her, a thought familiar to all who behold great elephants, or whales of an incredible magnitude, and that is how do these leviathans to whom obviously stress, change, and activity are repugnant, propagate their kind?”

• “Orlando then for the first time noticed a small cloud gathered behind the dome of St. Paul's. As the stroke sounded, the cloud increased, and she saw it darken and spread with extraordinary speed. ... Height upon height above the city was engulfed by it ... With the twelfth stroke of midnight, the darkness was complete. All was dark; all was doubt; all was confusion. The Eighteenth century was over; the Nineteenth century had begun.”

  This quote, in the voice of the narrator, closes chapter four.

• “Different though the sexes are, they intermix. In every human being a vacillation from one sex to the other takes place, and often it is only the clothes that keep the male and female likeness, while underneath the sex is the very opposite of what it is above. Of the complications and confusions which thus result every one has had experience; but here we leave the general question and note only the odd effect it had in the particular case of Orlando herself.”

  In this passage from chapter four, the narrator draws a general statement from the particular situation of Orlando.

• “Nature, who has played so many queer tricks upon us, making us so unequally of clay and diamonds, of rainbow and granite, and stuffed them into a case, often of the most incongruous, for the poet has a butcher's face and the butcher a poet's; nature, who has so much to answer for besides the perhaps unwieldy length of this sentence, has further complicated our task and added to our confusion by providing...a perfect rag-bag of odds and ends within us...<and> has contrived that the whole assortment shall be lightly stitched together by a single thread. Memory is the seamstress and a capricious one at that.”

  This quote is found in chapter two and is written in the voice of the narrator- biographer. It is the narrator's reflections on the strange acts of nature, which seems to craft people in odd and unusual ways.

• “Up to this point...documents, both private and historical, have made it possible to fulfill the first duty of a biographer, which is to plod, without looking right or left, in the indelible footprints of truth... on and on methodically until we fall plump into the grave and write finis on the tombstone above our heads.”

  This passage, written in the voice of the narrator-biographer, provides the opening to chapter two.

• “It is these pauses that are our undoing. It is then that sedition enters the fortress and our troops rise in insurrection. Once before he had paused, and love with its horrid rout, its shawms, its cymbals, and its heads with gory locks torn from the shoulders had burst in....Now again he paused, and into the breach thus made, leapt Ambition, the harridan, and Poetry, the witch, and Desire of Fame, the strumpet; all joined hands and made of his heart their dancing ground. Standing upright in the solitude of his room, he vowed that he would be the first poet of his race and bring immortal lustre upon his name.”

  This passage, in the narrator's voice, describes Orlando in chapter two.

• “Legs, hands, carriage, were a boy’s, but no boy ever had a mouth like that; no boy had those breasts; no boy had eyes which looked as if they had been fished from the bottom of the sea.”

Setting & Locations edit see section history

• London
• England
• Turkey
• Constantinople
• Russia
• Blackfriars
• Cape Horn
• Atlantic Ocean

First Sentence edit see section history

Glossary edit see section history

• arras: Wall hanging or tapestry.
• asphodel: Unidentified flower of legend covering Elysian Fields.
• baize: Imitation felt, often bright green and covering gaming tables.
• barouche landau: Four-wheeled carriage.
• bumboat: Small boat used to peddle provisions and small wares to ships anchored offshore.
• caracole: Half turn to either side performed by a horseman.
• congee: To take ceremonious leave.
• cormorant: Aquatic bird having dark plumage, webbed feet, a hooked bill, and a distensible pouch.
• drugget: Heavily felted fabric for floor covering.
• farthingale: Hoop worn beneath a woman's skirt in the 16th and 17th centuries.
• flagon: Vessel for drink usually made of metal or pottery and having a handle and spout.
• fritillarites: Plants of genus Fritillaria having nodding, often spotted or checkered flowers.
• furze: Spiny shrub.
• gorse: Spiny, thickset shrub of the genus Ulex.
• hob: Projection in a fireplace for keeping things warm.
• huzza: Shout of cheer.
• integument: Outer covering of a coat.
• lachrymose: Causing tears; sorrowful.
• lintel: Horizontal beam forming the upper member of a window or door frame supporting part of the structure above it.
• malacca: Stem of the rattan palm of Asia, used for walking sticks.
• midden: Refuse heap.
• offal: Waste parts.
• orgulous: Proud, haughty.
• ostler: Person in charge of horses.
• palanquin: East Asian covered litter, carried on poles on the shoulders of two or four men.
• perruque: Person who makes, dresses, or sells wigs.
• ptarmigan: Bird of genus Lagopus, of the arctic and subarctic regions of the Northern Hemisphere.
• puce: Deep red to dark greyish purple.
• purlieus: Outskirts; environs.
• sciatica: Neuralgia of the sciatic nerve in the leg.
• shawm: Double-reed wind instument forerunner of the oboe.
• skittle: Game of ninepins.
• tarn: Small mountain lake.
• truncheon: Short stick carried by police.
• welter: Confusion; turmoil.
• wherry: Light rowboat for one person often used in racing.
• wimples: Cloth wound around the head, framing the face, and drawn into folds beneath the chin, worn by women in medieval times and as part of the habit of certain orders of nuns.

Series & Lists edit see section history

Preceded by Story of the Eye, and followed by Lady Chatterley's Lover.

Preceded by The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and followed by Tropic of Cancer.

Preceded by Consider Phlebas, and followed by Stranger in a Strange Land.

Authors & Contributors edit see section history

1. Virginia Woolf (Author)

Other Contributors:

1. Darryl Pinckney (Adapter)
2. Robert Wilson (Adapter)
3. Mark Hussey (Preface)
4. Jean-Michel Déprats (Translator)

First Edition edit see section history

Awards edit see section history

• Publishing Triangle's 100 Best Lesbian and Gay Novels

Subjects edit see section history

• Books › Literature & Fiction › Classics

Links to Supplemental Material edit see section history

• Wikipedia

Movie Connections edit see section history

• Orlando (IMDb): Sally Potter, 1992

Books That Influenced This Book edit see section history

Books Influenced by This Book edit see section history

Books That Cite This Book edit see section history