Literary Masters will be meeting on November 21 to finish analysing the book Orlando by Virginia Woolf.
Literary Masters Meeting Notes
The Literary masters group met on Thursday 14th November at the home of Vivien Lane. Six members attended the meeting to analyse and discuss the second half of Virginia Woolf’s “Orlando: a Biography”.
In the second half of the book, Orlando seamlessly changes gender from male to female and marries a sea captain. She continues to dress as a female and a male throughout the rest of the book. At the time, homosexuality was criminalized under British law. As a lesbian and maybe bisexual both Virginia Woolf and her former lover Vita Sackville-West married men.
As a woman, Orlando won an important court case allowing her to inherit property in a legal system that did not recognize female heirs. This fictional inheritance was by way of compensation for her muse Vita Sackville-West, on whom the character Bloom was based, since as a female, Vita was unable to inherit her ancestral home “Knole”. Orlando hosts salons for many poets in the 18th and 19th century including the esteemed poet Alexander Pope.
Orlando’s critic Nick Greene also appears throughout the centuries as both foe and admirer. In 1928, centuries after Orlando started writing the “Oak Tree”, it is published to great acclaim.
Vita Sackville-West’s son Nigel Nicolson has described Orlando as “the longest and most charming love letter in literature”.