Are you looking for stories that anticipate the future? Well, first of all, ignore science fiction. Back in the mid-1970s, Star Wars might have been the biggest box office hit with its extravagant futurism and cutting edge special effects; but for my money, The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1977) did a better job of anticipating American ways and means of a later day. In pop music, David Bowie was closer to the mark with Ziggy Stardust than "Space Oddity." And the same is true of early modern fiction: in the late 1920s, Edgar Rice Burroughs excited readers with his adventure books set on the planet Mars and in the mythical world of Pellucidar (located beneath the Earth's crust), but Virginia Woolf's Orlando (1928) was far more forward-looking than anything in the sci-fi camp.
Back in the 1920s, the word 'gender' usually only showed up in your high school Latin textbook, or in other equally boring discussions of grammar. You talked about it with the same enthusiasm you referred to the 15 uses of the ablative case or the hortatory subjunctive. For the record, 'gender' only appears once in Orlando —in a description of an article of clothing 'of ambiguous gender'—but even this passing mention is revealing. Orlando is a book where the concept of gender is wide-ranging and deliberately amorphous, and not just with the clothes (or anything else) left hanging in the closet; in Ms. Woolf's fictive universe, the biological imperatives seemingly set in stone at birth can be countered and redefined. Male and female are no longer binary oppositions, but part of a fluid continuum. Sound familiar?
Orlando enters chapter one as a man and—about a third of the way through the novel—turns into a woman. If this were a science fiction novel, some new technology or advanced medical procedure would be inserted at this point, or a strange nuclear fallout that messes with X and Y chromosomes. But Virginia Woolf did not write that kind of a novel. In her story, Orlando simply falls asleep as a man and wakes up as a woman. "He stretched himself. He rose. He stood upright, and….we have no choice left but confess— he was a woman…..The change seemed to have been accomplished painlessly and completely and in such a way that Orlando herself showed no surprise at it." Nor do the many people who deal with Orlando express any amazement—although the courts have a field day dealing with the legal implications of this transformation (another way in which Orlando anticipated a later day, no?).
And Woolf takes the same liberties with biological aging as she does with gender. Orlando is born under the reign of the first Queen Elizabeth, and by the time the book concludes, she is still around for the birth of the second Queen Elizabeth. Over the course of more than three centuries, Orlando has aged a little but, with no help from Botox of the surgeon's knife, is still barely into middle age at the conclusion of our story, which Woolf tells us, in the final sentence, takes place at "the twelfth stroke of midnight, Thursday, the eleventh of October, Nineteen hundred and Twenty Eight."
Along the way Orlando has a dalliance with Elizabeth (the first, not the second), pursues an ill-fated romance (while still a man) with a Russian princess —an interlude based on an affair between Vita Sackville-West, a real-life model for Orlando, with Violet Trefusis; he serves as ambassador in Constantinople, and (now as a woman) lives with gypsies before returning to England. Orlando takes up the cause of British letters, and associates with John Dryden, Jonathan Swift, Joseph Addison and other esteemed authors—who invariably are less prepossessing in person than on the printed page. After friendships and courtships with women and men—or, in one instance, a woman who turns out to be a man, in a mirror image of Orlando's own transformation—our heroine marries a sea captain, and becomes a prize-winning writer herself.
But no synopsis of the plot can do justice to the distinctive qualities of this novel. For all its fanciful storylines, the tone and atmosphere of Orlando is what readers will remember about the book. I first read Woolf's novel during my student years, after a visit to Knole House , one of the largest country estates in England, with hundreds of rooms and located on a thousand acres—a residence for Sackville-West's ancestors and the inspiration for Orlando's palatial home in Woolf’s novel. In my memory the texture of the novel blurred with the colors and images of the Knole House paintings and tapestries. A mythic quality pervades these pages, which seem to present a stylized and heightened kind of existence, not real life as we live it, but as we might encounter in a hallucination or dream.
"Sunsets were redder and more intense," Woolf writes; "dawns were whiter and more auroral. Of our crepuscular half-light they knew nothing. The rain fell vehemently, or not at all. The sun blazed or there was darkness….The withered intricacies of and ambiguities of our more gradual and doubtful age were unknown to them. Violence was all. The flower bloomed and faded. The sun rose and sank. The lover loved and went."
But on re-reading the work nowadays, I pick up so much more than I perceived at the age of twenty. I am now familiar with Woolf's other novels, and turn to her for the sheer beauty of her language as much as for the story itself. Few writers in the history of the English language have ever written better, on a sentence-by-sentence basis, or gone further in blurring the boundaries between prose and poetry. But above all, Orlando stands out today as a prescient forerunner of so many later novels—from The Left Hand of Darkness to Middlesex —that present gender as dynamic rather than static, and have made femininity and masculinity as surface themes, rather than unstated presumptions, in contemporary fiction.
But, ultimately, no single category or label can do justice to this sui generis work. Woolf offers the subtitle "A Biography" to her novel, and in the course of its pages repeatedly adopts the tone of a biographer or historian—albeit, usually in mockery of the conventional attitudes adopted by chroniclers of past lives. We might also be justified in treating Orlando as a roman à clef , and attempting to find the real life people that stand behind the fictional characters. Or we could classify this novel under the rubric of magical realism or fantasy. Just as readily, this novel can withstand interpretation as a political novel, or serve as a springboard for discussions of various social, psychological or cultural themes—as documented by the numerous dissertations written on this book. But I suspect that Nigel Nicolson, son of Vita Sackville-West, may have summed it up best. In his words, Orlando is "the longest and most charming love-letter in literature." And though Woolf may have written it with Nigel's mother in mind, we can still fall under the emotional sway of her billet-doux these many years later.