Orlando Themes

Virginia Woolf was an important artistic contributor to the modernist movement of the 20th century, which sought to break from traditional forms of artistic expression. Modernists like Woolf believed that traditional forms of writing—be it poetry, prose, and even biography—were a poor fit for their new and changing world. The early 20th century saw sweeping changes politically, socially, and economically—and since the world was changing, modernists figured, so should art. Woolf’s Orlando is one such…

In Orlando, Virginia Woolf implies that biographies of the past have failed to effectively capture a subject because they rely too heavily on what is perceived as objective fact. The book’s subject, Orlando, is a fictional character based upon Woolf’s real-life friend and lover, Vita Sackville-West, and Orlando’s unbelievable life spans some 400 years. Orlando is also a history of English literature, and it was written specifically with Woolf’s elite circle of friends…

Orlando, the protagonist and title character of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, undergoes profound personal and physical changes in the novel, and he lives in a world that likewise drastically transforms. When the narrator first introduces Orlando, he is a young boy of 16 in Elizabeth I’s court, sometime around the mid-1670s. By the end of the novel, however, Orlando is a 36-year-old woman who gets out of her car on “the twelfth stroke…