Summary Of Orlando By Virginia Woolf

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Orlando by Virginia Woolf The first time I read Orlando by Virginia Woolf, I was very confused. It seemed that the book was about time travel, as if Orlando was like Dr. Who or Sam Beckett from Quantum Leap. Then the lead character changes gender and decades so effortlessly without any explanation or alarm. Upon further investigation, I realized how interesting Orlando and Virginia Woolf really were, especially for the time period. The plot context doesn’t really necessarily matter. Like Roger Ebert writes in Chicago Sun-Times, "it is not about a story or a plot, but about a vision of human existence." Woolf wrote this faux-biography as playful fun and without too much seriousness. I believe she based a great deal of the story on her own …show more content…

She spent time vacationing with her parents and 5 siblings in the summers at St. Ives. She had a happy childhood, until her mother died when she was 10 years old. The death of her mother sparked a chain reaction of disasters in her life. A few years later her father died and then her older sister. The remaining siblings decided to move away from the city, where they were subject to observation and scrutiny, and they relocated to Brighton. This was considered scandalous because it wasn’t a desired area at the time, but they Stephens’s children took refuge in their new home. They flourished in the arts. After a trip to Greece her older brother came down with Typhoid fever and died. Virginia had seen too much tragedy and it took a toll on her mental stability. Virginia struggled with manic depression and sometime schizophrenia. She would go through phases of her life where she was out of control. She also had issues with …show more content…

She has us follow Orlando’s journey through life, and experience how the genders were approached in the different eras. Also, she constantly reminds the reader that even though Orlando has changed genders, dressed in both male and female clothes, and took male and female lovers, Orlando has always remained the same. Woolf resented the education that she received as a child, her brothers were allowed to attend proper school, but Virginia and her sisters had to stay at home and get home schooled by their parents. Even though her Parents were well educated people, Woolf found the inequality to be extremely

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