How does it affect one’s reading to know that the figure of Orlando is based on Virginia Woolf’s friend Vita Sackville-West?
What are implications of the name Orlando? (from Orlando Furioso)
What are some arch or parodic elements included in Woolf’s Acknowledgments? (gentleman from America who sent corrections)
How would you describe Woolf's tone throughout? (arch, alternately comic and serious, swift moving, undercuts the character's frequent rhapsodies)
Chapter 1
What do you make of the opening scene? Is it a parody of knightly imperialism, or the reverse? In general, what tone is used to describe the young Orlando’s pursuits and temperament?
What importance is given to describing his natural environment and home? The social hierarchy in which he lives?
What seems the writer’s attitude toward English Renaissance culture? What aspects of it does she find particularly repellent?
Do you find his characterization convincing, and if not, what may it lack?
What issues of gender and gender ambiguity are raised by the descriptions of Orlando and Sasha? Of identity itself? (31)
What are some qualities of Sasha that attract Orlando?
How does the narrator parody modernity? Her contemporary literature? 31 (realism is crude)
What is the importance of the narrative voice? Might it be described as a character? What importance is given to the figure of the biographer, and what purpose is served by mentioning him/her from time to time?
What are some ways in which romance is parodied in Orlando’s relationship with Sasha? (38, 40) Is it important that the romance is ended through deceit?
What is added to the story by the descriptions of London? How is Orlando’s witness of a Shakespearean play presented, and what symbolic importance does this serve? (ties story to literary London)
What is the symbolic importance of the final scene of the spring ice breaking, and the human destruction caused thereby? (long freezes of Thames common between 1600 and 1800)
Chapter 2
What satiric comments are offered on the medicine of the period? (67)
How are black persons introduced/described in the narrative? Are Woolf’s descriptions racist? (70, 73)
Why do you think Sir Thomas Browne’s Pleasures of Melancholy is introduced?
What remarks are made on the nature of a biographer and his/her readers? To what extent are these parodic? (73)
How is Orlando’s growing love of literature introduced? (73-74) What tone is adopted toward the topics of his writing, and which theme does he finally prefer? (76-77)
To what extent can Orlando be seen as a personal history of English letters?
How is memory described? (78ff.) What are qualities of Woolf’s prose in this passage?
What are some ways in which the author uses hyperbole, humor, and paradox to make her points?
What purpose is served by presenting the figure of Nicholas Greene as a representative writer of the period? What are some of Greene’s less-than-ideal traits?
What prompts Green to depart? Is this humorous? (silence of estate, 93)
What observations does the narrator make on the subject of time? (98) Its relativity? Its dailiness? In what context may all things be said to be associated? (101)
What mental shift does Orlando experience as he considers the futility of fame? (103, writes for himself) What environment seems best for his writing? (obscurity, seclusion, 105)
How does he respond the antiquity of his large home? (tries to improve and decorate it on a massive scale, 107-8)
What do we make of the appearance of the Archduchess Harriet? What change does this precipitate? (he flees, 118)
Chapter 3
What are some of Orlando's experiences in Constantinople? In particular, what unexpected experience does s/he undergo?
Why do you think this transition may have occurred in a foreign location? What satiric purpose is served by the pagent of Truth, Chastity, and Modesty which precedes the transition? (137) Why does this precipitate a return to England?
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Would you describe this as an essentially plotless biography? (emphasis on mutability over time) From a realist perspective, what elements seem missing from Orlando's life?
What consequences do the fact that Orlando never has children have upon the plot?