The Feminist Book Club 3

14.12.2023

Virginia Woolf: Orlando, 1928.
Sally Potter: Orlando, 1992.

14. 12. 2023.

When she began writing Orlando in 1927, Virginia Woolf had already published novels that placed her in the modernist canon: Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927). In these novels, she explored modernist techniques such as stream of consciousness and free indirected speech, which marked a break with nineteenth-century third-person realist narrative. A decade before Orlando, she and her husband Leonard Woolf founded the famous publishing house The Hogarth Press, known for its publications of T. S. Eliot and Freud. Together with her husband and her sister, the painter Vanessa Bell, she was a member of the Bloomsbury Group, a group of artists and intellectuals who met from 1907 to 1930. In this environment, Virginia Woolf also met a writer from the aristocratic Sackville-West family, to whom she dedicated Orlando (the story of the Sackville family partly inspired the novel, and the family portraits were included in the book edition along with those of Vita). Many interpretations of Orlando have focused precisely on the author's relationship with Vita; however, the novel is too complex to be interpreted solely through the prism of the dedication – and the text itself resists such a reading in several places.

Questions that we discussed in the club:

• How is the novel structured?
• What is the definition of its genre and how is it treated in the novel?
• How does storytelling draw attention to itself?
• Does the narrator use any historical/documentary sources? What significance do they have in the text?
• What role do the portraits play in this book?
• Critique of gender relations and sexual/gender inequality: relationship to social norms, sexuality, marriage, family, profession.

Orlando in the context of his family and English society:

• What changes does the sex change bring about?
• Does the change in Orlando's gender lead to a change in the narrative?
• The relationship between literature and the world, the position of the poet in society and in the literary field.
• How is Orlando's love of literature portrayed?
• How is the structure of the film related to the novel?
• Can we recognize analogies of the writing techniques in the film techniques?