Although I chose to abandon Orlando midway, a conversation elsewhere made me pause. Frances’s post at Nonsuch Book, part of the Woolf in Winter project, wrote with such clarity about her rereading that something shifted; not my view of the book, which remains unfinished, but my view of the act of refusal.
I am wary of attributing every reading failure to timing. Sometimes the refusal is not circumstantial but structural: something within the book that cannot be crossed. Yet here I recognise that my aversion was less principled than I supposed. The tone of Orlando, its theatricality and slyness, met me when I had little patience for irony. I was looking for quiet, for interiority. What I found instead was pageantry. So I closed the book and moved on.
Perhaps Orlando is not a novel I will come to admire. But the book I rejected may still contain something I need, and I return to it, if I return, with a slightly altered texture of thought. Not the same reader. Not then.
>Thanks Anthony. Too kind. Hoping to see you in two weeks for The Waves. We will need you for that one. Happy reading.
>I'm looking forward to The Waves. I read the introduction in the OUP edition. It did a good job of whetting my appetite.Currently though I am reading, slowly, The Vagrants. So powerful.
I have come to terms that, although Virginia Woolf is one of my favourite authors, there are some of her books that will never rank quite so highly with me. And Orlando is one of them. It’s fun, it’s a pageant, as you say, and a little of it goes a long way. It’s one of the few I’ve not attempted to reread in recent years, so who knows… maybe I might feel differently about it now. But in my teens and twenties I did not admire it as much as her other work.