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Orlando finally arrived in the present tense of the author, 1928. She is only 36 years old, but feels: Time has passed over me. ... I am sick of this particular self. I want another. And although she had a great variety of selves to call upon stacked one on top of another as plates are piled on a waiter's hand, she cannot find her TRUE self.

19th century brings along abundant growth, crinoline and love. Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine (what a name!) finds Orlando with a hurt ankle like Willoughby finds Marianne Dashwood in "Sense and Sensibility". Their shared ambiguity of sex - "Mar" has rather feminine appearance - brings them close. They marry and mate, but must separate after few days. End of Chapter 5

Bored by the conversations at ladies' invitations Orlando starts to invite the top three poets of her time, Pope, Addison and Swift, to her home. But every secret of a writer's soul ... is written large in his works and the gentlemen are less entertaining in real life. Finally Orlando professed great enjoyment in the society of her own sex and starts to vacillate between roles and sexes.

Orlando sails home to Britain. During the voyage she is confronted with the opportunites and limits of being a woman. As a young man she had insisted that women must be obient, chaste and scented, and exquisitely apparelled. Now she herself has to pay the price for those convictions, "Heavens! What fools they make of us - what fools we are!"

Truth! Thruth! Truth! we have no choice left but confess - he was a woman. The central sentence of this novel marks the change of Orlando's sex. But this is not the only mythical element. Only unnoticed Orlandos lifetime has spread from the late days of Queen Elizabeth I. (end of 16th century) to King George I (beginning of 18th)!

Orlando's affair with a Russian princess was about losing my interest, only to regain full attention, when the ice breaks up after the great frost and many people die on the melting sheets of ice. Virgina Woolf paints a horrifying, but very imaginative picture.

This is my first encounter with Virginia Woolf. I am reading in English and the first pages already tell me that Mrs Woolf is a master of language.