I was perhaps nine when I read Orlando. My mother was a literature major, and our house was chockers with Penguin Classics with their orange and black and pale green spines. I’m confident that in letting me read whatever books I liked, she did not intend to implant in me the idea that one could just…become another gender.
Becoming ‘other’ was already a given in my mythology. Animals become heroes. Ordinary children become mighty kings and queens. Wardrobes become portals, and the very best parties turn into treasure hunts. As long as you know where your towel is, the rest will work itself out, more or less. I was thus very comfortable with the idea of waking up one day as someone else and it all being perfectly manageable and not at all like hell (Kafka aside).
The matter-of-factness in Orlando is one of its strengths. Though the book is about gender, it is not really about trans identity, which at the time of its writing was certainly extant but not under such terms as we know it today. Orlando doesn’t consciously surrender their gender. It is instead taken away by unspecified means, which are beside the point as Orlando goes on to navigate their new gender while retaining the perceptual filters of their first.
Can I confess to remembering very little otherwise? Adult attempts at reading Woolf have been troublesome. Her style of writing is an effort to read, and I am generally disinterested in domestic dramas, so there go most of her plots. This book is however iconoclastic, and is up there with Voltaire’s Candide and Orwell’s Animal Farm as a literary classic worth trying to get people to read when they’re far too young.
Can’t be arsed reading? There’s a film… https://www.indiewire.com/2012/09/heroines-of-cinema-tilda-swinton-and-sally-potters-orlando-44615/
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