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„Orlando� was my first book by Virginia Woolf. I hardly knew anything other than the author’s name and the fact that she is often mentioned in a feminist context. The context of her life, however, is essential for the understanding of this book. Orlando is the doppelgänger of Vita Sackville-West, born in one of the oldest families in England, rich, glamourous, a writer herself and enamoured in and by both sexes. Vita and Virginia’s relationship manoeuvred between close friendship and a love affair, but was always overshadowed by Woolf’s mental instability. This novel is a literary monument Mrs. Woolf for her friend.



What makes this book unique is the description of a personality that is not bound by borders, neither those of time nor those of sex. At the end of the novel she had a great variety of selves to call upon and realizes that the true self is the compact of all the selves we have it in us to be. This insight is universal. While I do not have Orlando’s longevity nor ever changed my sex, there is clearly the notion of me having lived in rather different places, circumstances and roles, almost different lives. And regarding sex, we know from science that sexual identity is not binary. Being attracted by a person of a different gender than usually happens to much more people than religions and conventions want to make us believe. For me as a physicist this is not a new concept at all. Quantum physics, in fact, tell us that all systems are an overlay of states. Which state can be observed, depends on the specific way that we look at this system, i.e. the experiment.

Now, did I like this novel? Not really. It cost me a lot of effort to read it along with the collaterals required for its understanding. I did enjoy, though, the language. And the fact that I underlined so many passages tell me, that it was worth it.