Orlando
Virginia Woolf(1928)
Extract
For she had a great variety of selves to call upon.
A young Elizabethan nobleman begins life under the first Elizabeth and is still alive, now a woman, three centuries later, driving through modern London with a manuscript on her lap. Virginia Woolf published this novel in 1928 as a love letter to Vita Sackville-West, and it is the most joyful book she ever wrote: a mock biography that dissolves the boundaries of gender, time, and literary convention with the ease of someone changing clothes. Orlando wakes one morning in Constantinople to find himself female, and the narrative barely pauses. The real subject is the self's fluidity, the way identity persists through transformation like a river that changes direction but never ceases to flow. Time obeys no one here, and neither does desire.
If you loved this
Murasaki wrote the original novel of a beautiful person moving through centuries of court life, a thousand years before Woolf.
Woolf's other masterpiece of a single consciousness moving through time, but compressed to one day instead of four centuries.
Eliot writes the same question of what a brilliant woman can become, but without the freedom of changing sex or century.