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I knew for sure I wasn't expecting anything like 'To the Lighthouse' with Orlando, but what I didn't know is just how much I'd end up liking it. Woolf has broken with tradition and convention and has set out to explore a kind of fourth dimensional approach to writing. Not that she has abandoned the stream of consciousness method which she used with such conspicuous success in her previous novels, but with it she has combined what, for lack of a better term, we might describe as an application to writing of the theory of relativity. In this novel, or biography, however one chooses to see it, she is largely preoccupied with the time element in character and human relationships, and with a statement of the exact complexion of that intangible moment, a combination of past and future, of objective reality and subjective awareness, which we refer to as the present.

Woolf’s hero-heroine, man-woman, he-she, is hundreds of years old, lucky him/her! At the beginning of the book Orlando is an adolescent male, melancholic, indolent, loving solitude and given to writing poetry; the age is the Elizabethan; the book ends on the 11th of October, 1928, and Orlando is a thoroughly modern matron of 36, who has published a successful book of poems and has evolved a hard-earned philosophy of life. Thus, to express her very modern fourth-dimensional concepts, Woolf has fallen back upon one of the most ancient of literary forms, the allegory. In doing so she has left the novel perhaps more confusing than was strictly necessary. However, I personally think nothing should have been any different. I can see why for some it's seen as a masterpiece.

Starting around the time of The Great Frost of 1608/09 where birds froze whilst flying and hurtled to the ground, Orlando moves on to languorous sunny afternoons spent in the shade of oak trees and the hot sun of Turkey. Even so, this could be classed as a winter read. As Orlando never leaves the ice entirely, since he, and then she, is simply frozen in time. Even hundreds of years later there remains the same person who fell in love on those winter days in the 17th century, and those heady days breathe their cold magic throughout this strange and bewildering novel. Plus, Woolf can't resist returning to the cold now and again, most notably in her description of the permanent winter damp and black cloud that hung over the 19th century.

After Orlando’s attempts to adjust herself to the conventions of nineteenth century England. Woolf excels with by far the most stimulating section of the book, describing Orlando at the present moment, and traces with breath-taking delicacy the influence of her past upon her present. It is deep in the book when suddenly Orlando springs startlingly to life, not that there was anything wrong previously, but up to a point it had seemed a pleasant narrative made notable by a number of passages of great beauty, love and attention, and by occasional bits of vivid description, but marred slightly by a rather self-conscious mischievousness on the part of the author. Having said that, even it's worst bits were still good.

In the closing pages she welds compactly what had seemed to be a series of loosely connected episodes. In them she seems to reach down into the rabbit hole for the whole superstructure of life and to lay bare a new, or at least a hitherto unperceived, arrangement of those ephemeral flashes of memory of perception that makes up consciousness. But she has carried the stream of consciousness technique a step further. Not being satisfied to present a succession of thoughts and sensations passing through the mind, she shows what is behind those thoughts and sensations, whence they spring, and how great their relative value. In attempting to describe such subtle and elusive qualities, Woolf has faced squarely one of the most puzzling technical and esthetic problems that plague contemporary novelists. The mere fact that she has stated the problem as succinctly as she does in the course of this book is immensely stimulating, whether or not one feels that she has achieved the final solution to it.

A dizzy and captivating reading experience, but just not quite up there with The Waves. Just hope I don't wake up in the morning and find I am now Stephanie.