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Virginia
Woolf described Orlando as "an escapade,
half-laughing, half-serious; with great splashes of exaggerations," but many
think Woolf's escapade is one of the most wickedly imaginative and sharply observed
consideration of androgyny that this century will see. Orlando is, in fact,
a character liberated from the restraints of time and sex. Born in the Elizabethan
Age to wealth and position, he is a young male aristocrat at the beginning of
the story - and a modern woman four centuries later. The hero-heroine sees monarchs
come and go, hobnobs with great literary figures, and slips in and out of each
new fashion. Woolf presents a brilliant pageant of history, society, and literature
as well as subtle appreciation of the interplay between endings and beginnings,
past and present, male and female. |
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Woolf--
a major British novelist, essayist, and critic-- was one of the leaders in the
literary movement of modernism. This elite group also included Gertrude Stein,
James Joyce, Ezra Pound, and T. S. Eliot. In her works, she used a technique
called "stream of consciousness", revealing the lives of her characters by revealing
their thoughts and associations. Her most famous novel, To
the Lighthouse, which was written in 1927, examines the life of an upper
middle class British family. It portrays the fragility of human relationships
and the collapse of social values. She was also a feminist, socialist, and pacifist
who expressed her beliefs in essays such as A Room of
One's Own. |
