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"Orlando" just became my favourite Virginia Woolf book. And my favourite of her characters. I'd never thought someone could outrank Clarissa Dalloway, but here we are.

It's a novel that plays with time and gender, with a protagonist who moves across centuries in a surreal story that fascinated me from the first to the last page. Orlando begins as a young nobleman in the Elizabethan era, a favorite of Queen Elizabeth I, enjoying wealth and privilege, and ends up as a modern woman in the 20th century, experiencing different roles as a page, a lover, an ambassador, a noblewoman, a poet, a wife.

From the start, Orlando is a bit of a gigolo - charming, indulgent, floating through the courts of Elizabethan England with seductive ease. He falls deeply in love with the mysterious Russian princess Sasha, a passionate relationship that feels like a dream. But then - nope, it’s not. Whatever love he thought he had is shattered just like warm weather shatters the ice on the Thames. This is a pattern that follows Orlando throughout the novel, a symbol of his constant change. Is the way he swings from extreme joy to despair, from man to woman, from century to century, a mirror of the instability that Woolf herself experienced during her lifetime? I've asked myself this question throughout my read.

His/ her continued transformation throughout the book is completely natural. Orlando doesn’t panic; she simply is. On the inside, the same person, but now a woman. And so we follow her through history from new perspectives, navigating her new identity and the rigid expectations regarding womanhood, encountering characters such as the absurd Archduchess Henrietta/ Archduke Harry, another play on the gender fluidity theme of the novel. (Why is she Romanian though? That's not a Romanian name, nor did we have "archduchesses". Slight annoyance.) Meanwhile, people like Alexander Pope, Joseph Addison and Jonathan Swift take us inside the literary world Orlando is trying to be a part of.

Virginia Woolf takes, through Orlando's character, a close look at the way gender roles are viewed across centuries. Orlando doesn't fit into either gender’s patterns and her mannerisms remain fluid even after her transformation. Beyond that, she retains her past experiences and outlook and is able to make insightful comparisons between what being a man and what being a woman feel like and how society views each gender. As a man, Orlando never questioned women’s limitations; he saw them as exotic, mysterious objects of pleasure. After the transformation, she becomes aware of how restrictive life is for women, from the expectations of society to sit in their drawing room and sew to legal issues such as being unable to own property - society wants them silent, invisible, delicate.

I loved how Virginia Woolf uses shifts in setting and detailed descriptions to mark the passage of time. We're barely told what century it is, but the transformations of London, in particular, and of Orlando's house, take the reader through the different eras seamlessly.

This novel is also a satire, not only of gender roles, but also of nobility and even of the literary world, with its rigid expectations of the male-dominated literary canon which Virginia Woolf herself broke.

Like all her novels, "Orlando" is experimental and introspective. Woolf makes use of metafiction to point out even stronger the absurdities of gender identities and societal expectations. It's not a scholarly approach, instead I found it quite playful, something I've never said about Woolf's works before. Just like the author, Orlando is unique and refuses to be framed in a specific category.