By the time she published Orlando: A Biography in 1928, Virginia Woolf was already a leading voice in English modernism, having revolutionized the novel form with her omniscient stream-of-consciousness prose in Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse. Orlando spans three centuries in the life of a single character, Orlando: an aristocrat, romantic, and man—until she is a woman. Praised as a “wonderful phantasmagoria” by Woolf’s contemporaries, the novel has since been widely adapted for theater, film, and the opera stage. What explains the enduring appeal of the novel and of a character—inspired by Woolf’s lover Vita Sackville-West—who defies narrative convention, the human lifespan, and the gender binary?
In this course, we will read Orlando in its entirety alongside commentary, journals, and letters by Woolf and Sackville-West. We will also consider contemporary adaptations of the text, including the 1992 film, the 2010 play by Sarah Ruhl, and the French film Orlando: My Political Biography (2023). We will consider the novel’s implications for queer and transgender readers, its impact on the modernist canon, and its complex articulations of race, class, gender, and national identity during the formative years of the British Empire. How did Orlando both perfect and scrutinize the modern biographical form? How did Woolf navigate the narrative dilemmas of gender variance as a novelist and a feminist? What does Orlando have to say about the contours of modernity, the viability of romantic love in the age of total war, and the limits of the novelistic genre to depict the modern condition?
