Orlando
Virginia Woolf
Penguin 1928 This Ed-1993 272pp with lots of notes, PB
“He – for there could be no doubt of his sex – though the fashion of the time did something to disguise it – was in the act of slicing at the head of a Moor which swung from the rafters.”
This book – directed by Sally Potter – stars my favoritist actor Tilda Swinton and while I have watched the movie hundreds of times I have only just now read the book. It is lovely and subtley and although I often felt as though I was intruding on a private conversation between close friends, I enjoyed every minute of it. So full of sly observant wit and comments on the place of women in the world – and the world of the previous 500 years.
Queen Elizabeth 1 ordered the delightful young Orlando (he of the spunkiest legs in Christendom) to never age, never grow old. And he obeys – through revolution, poetry, broken hearts and lawsuits and a change of gender, parenthood and marriage – Orlando remains his/her beautiful ageless self. But not without some hard won truths along the way
She remembered how, as a young man, she had insisted that women must be obedient, chaste, scented, and exquisitely apparelled. ‘Now I shall have to pay in my own person for those desires,’ she reflected; ‘for woman are not (judging by my own short experience of the sex) obedient, chase, scented, and exquisitely apparelled by nature, They can only attain these graces, without which they may enjoy none of the delights of life, by the most tedious discipline. There’s the hairdressing…that alone will take an hour of my morning…
Full of quotable quotes. Read it.
- posted by FuschiaReads @ 5:27 PM
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