MAY 1, 2025 | ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT | By Greta Patterson (A&E Copy Editor)
Well friends, the time has come for the final installation of Book of the Block (BOTB). It occurred to me that with all the recommendations I’ve given throughout this column, I have yet to write about the book that has truly changed my life, the book that is more accurately categorized as “Book of the Always.” It only makes sense to end BOTB with my favorite book of all time – “Orlando” by Virginia Woolf.
Published in 1928, “Orlando” follows the eponymous protagonist Orlando over the course of 300 years, beginning in Elizabethan England when Orlando is a young nobleman and ending in 1928 with Orlando as a woman, publishing her poem “The Oak Tree.” It is a remarkably complex book, with themes of gender identity, orientalism, nationality and sexuality.
Woolf, one of the foremost feminist writers in the early 20th century, created “Orlando” as a mock auto-fictional biography, based on the life and ancestry of Vita Sackville-West, her lover. While Woolf was married to someone she considered a true companion, her relationship with Sackville-West was passionate and intense. Woolf created “Orlando” in part to mock the structures of historiography and biography and in part to share the story of her and Sackville-West’s relationship.
One of the most remarkable scenes in the whole book comes right in the middle, when Orlando falls into a trance and wakes up, transformed into a woman. In this, Woolf created a novel that was remarkably nuanced in its portrayal of gender – Orlando feels no difference in identity despite her new womanhood, leading to questions about gender identity versus internal identity. Was Orlando meant to be one of the first portrayals of a transgender character? Perhaps to some. For me personally, however, I believe this transformation can be viewed more as dismissing gender entirely as a social construct, allowing Orlando to focus more on core concepts such as poetry.
Poetry within the novel is central. The book ends on the stroke of midnight that marks the day that Orlando publishes her poem “The Oak Tree,” the same year that “Orlando” itself is published. Even through her gender transformation and different journeys, Orlando’s dedication to poetry is the one constant that she has.
Described by Sackville-West’s son as “the longest and most charming love letter in literature,” “Orlando” is a stunning portrayal of society, love, identity, art and culture. I encourage whoever decides to read it to go slowly into the folds of the page, to understand that so much of the value of “Orlando” as a novel is appreciating the intensity of every word, every sentence. To read “Orlando” is to read an incredibly vulnerable portrayal of Woolf’s life, one of the most prominent queer modernist authors.
“Orlando” stands not only as a love letter to Sackville-West, but to every version of ourselves as readers. In returning to this novel year after year, I find it clear that the impossibility of describing “Orlando” comes from the reality that it is constantly transforming as the reader themself transforms. There is nothing stagnant about Woolf’s writing, and her acute social awareness has proved to be both ahead of her time and ahead of ours. She remains inimitable in her writing, irreplicable in her craft of genre, and unrivaled in her ability to create a vision that swallows the reader whole in its entrancing power.
Reading has taken different shapes for me over the years – in some moments I desperately need a book to feel meaning, and in others I don’t think I’ll ever read again. Books have been a crutch and a weight, and it was only in college that I realized the extremity of this. Since starting Book of the Block, reading as something that creates community has come into focus, and it has been an absolute pleasure to share this wonderful journey of literature with you all.