carolinetew 's review for:

Orlando: A Biography by Virginia Woolf

2.0

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I have to be honest, I’m just not a big Woolf fan (or of modernists in general). Much of it felt like a worse version of the kind of early novels I like. This book certainly does some interesting things about the concept of gender. On one hand it’s fairly progressive for her to have depicted a character that inhabits the body of both a man and a woman throughout the book and it’s refreshing to see how little the change bothers society. On the other, there is a lot of description about how this or that characteristic derived from Orlando’s time as a man or a woman and I just feel like that’s such a narrow view of gender. Why can’t Orlando have that characteristic because they are Orlando? Why are certain parts of this person coming from the man part of Orlando? Perhaps I’m not the best person to critique this but those are my thoughts (I also admit that some of the parts I simply zoned out because I was relatively bored, so perhaps I missed some nuanced part of this depiction of gender).