Other Fiction Woolf, Virginia: Orlando. v1.1 17 Dec 2010

[NedC]

Published in 1928, Orlando is an enjoyable literary joke. It is also, according to Virginia Woolf's biographer Hermione Lee, "a critique of sexual censorship, and of fixed notions of sexual difference, which is also cunningly self-censoring. It covers its tracks and gets away with murder." Woolf's lover Vita Sackville-West posed for several of the illustrations.

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[Prestidigitweeze]

Orlando is also, as we now know, arguably the first 20th century novel to use magic realism.

The book was largely ignored by critics, who focused on Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, praising them as exemplary works by a master of the psychological novel -- works which are rather close stylistically to Freud's Six Psychological Studies as translated by Woolf's close friend, Lytton Strachey.

Among Woolf's novels, Orlando least fit the pattern which contemporary critics had chosen to trace. This began to change in the 70s and 80s.

One of my professors in college liked to say this change was an example of Lacan's deferred action memory -- something which is not remembered or understood until it is recontextualized -- creating a shift in the literary canon.

Fortunate reader, to be offered an edition formatted and scrutinized by NedC.