Of course I’ve read Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse and The Waves (although not lately). I had, however never got round to  reading Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. Then, last month I was invited to review Sarah Ruhl’s adaptation of it at Jermyn Street Theatre – strong, feisty 4 star theatre, I deemed it. It reminded me that it was high time I read the novel too.

It’s a light hearted work about ambiguous, shifting, sexuality and it therefore as topical now as when it was written nearly a century ago. Styling it a biography –  and sending up the genre, with authorial comments, just as her Bloomsbury  friend Lytton Strachey did in Eminent Victorians ten years earlier – she presents a protagonist whose existence spans four centuries and who is sometimes a man and sometimes a woman depending on which century we’re in. Whatever Orlando is at any given time the experience of previous stages of his/her life is there to refer to and inform present actions and reactions.

“The change seemed to have been accomplished painlessly and completely in such a way that Orlando herself showed no surprise at it. Many people, taking this into account and holding that such a change of sex is against nature, have always been at pains to prove (1) that Orlando had always been a woman and (2) that Orlando is at this moment a man. Let biologists and psychologists determine. It is enough for us to state the simple fact; Orlando was a man till the age of thirty; when he became a woman and has remained so ever since” (pp 93/4)

We trace Orlando quirkily through late 16^th, 17^th and 18^th centuries  when he is male, eventually becoming female in the nineteenth century. He/she encounters lovers of both sexes and those who change, goes on voyages and has adventures both ironically swashbuckling and amatory.  Some characters recur down the ages. It’s experimental writing which, like the music of late Schoenberg, still challenges and surprises.

In her preface Woolf acknowledges a whole string of writers, alive and dead, from whom she has drawn inspiration but mentions neither Voltaire nor Lewis Carroll (Charles Dodgson). Yet the sardonic style reminds me a lot of Candide and the surrealism of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

The novel is dedicated to, and was written for, Vita Sackville-West, She and Woolf were both in “open” marriages which allowed them to enjoy extramarital relationships if they wished. The famous, long passionate love affair between these two women is clearly at the heart of Orlando – even to the account of her rejection of a traditional female manner. Years ago I taught with a man who’d been at prep school with one of Sackville-West’s sons so he spent some of his school holidays at Sissinghurst where the family lived. His overriding memory was of her marching about, shouting orders, smoking heavily and swearing.

That pretty much matches Woolf’s description of the 20^th century Orlando. For instance Orlando would “change her skirt for a pair of whipcord breeches and leather jacket which she did in less than three minutes …Then she strode into the dining room.” Then “she cut herself a slice of bread and ham, clapped the two together and began to eat, striding up and down the room thus shedding her company habits without thinking, After five or six such turns, she tossed off a glass of red Spanish wine, and, filling another which she carried in her hand, strode through a dozen drawing rooms and so began a perambulation of the house, attended by such elk-hounds and spaniels as chose to follow her.” (pp 223/4)

The house – Orlando’s ancestral pile – is Knole at Sevenoaks where Sackville-West grew up and which Virginia Woolf loved although she’s wittily and relentlessly sardonic about its vast size.It’s odd though. Orlando is pretty explicit about same sex relationships and yet it was published to great acclaim, became a best seller and was soon one of Woolf’s most successful novels. Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness deals with similar issues in a rather different way. It was published in the same year – and banned.

PS Once an English teacher … it’s a joy to read something which uses the word sex correctly. “Her sex must be her excuse” and “She had hardly given her sex a thought” and “The curious of her own sex would argue”.  Yes, leave that over-used, misused word “gender” in grammar books and discussions where it belongs.

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves:  The Uncommon Reader by Alan Bennett

Penelope Lively, now 89, is a very unusual writer. She was a highly successful children’s novelist, winning The Carnegie Medal for The Ghost of Thomas Kempe in 1973 and the Whitbread Prize for A Stitch in Time in 1976. She is on record as agreeing with WH Auden that “There are good books which are only for adults. There are no good books which are only for children” so she turned to adult fiction. She did brilliantly at that too. In 1987 she won the Booker Prize for Moon Tiger, She then kept them coming. The Road to Lichfield was Booker shortlisted in 1977 as was According to Mark in 1984. In 2012 she became Dame Penelope Lively – and quite right too.

I read Moon Tiger when it was first published (and most of Lively’s books as they’ve appeared over the years since) and had very fond memories of it. And it doesn’t disappoint in 2022. If anything I’ve matured into it in the last 45 years so it seems even better now than it did then.

Claudia, has had a successful career as a journalist and author of history books. She now lies dying in a private room in a London hospital, reflecting on her life. She spent the war reporting from Egypt – and the country is evoked with colourful, convincing realism because Lively grew up there until she was 12.  The period detail is finely done too. The narrative slips from first to third person which is a neat technique because it means we see Claudia from a range of angles – most poignantly from the point of view of the nursing staff who have no idea what’s going on in Claudia’s head and treat her with professional, impersonal kindness, To them she’s just trying old woman, dying.

In Egypt – unbeknown to everyone else who knew/knows her –  Claudia met the love of her life but it is obvious to the reader almost from their first meeting that this is doomed because he doesn’t feature later. And this is an intricate novel full of time shifts. Instead there’s another man, still alive, who comes and goes but clearly isn’t the One, glamorous and prosperous as he is.

Feisty, argumentative Claudia had no talent for motherhood and doesn’t really know or understand her only daughter who dutifully now comes to the hospital. Also in the background is Claudia’s very close, borderline incestuous relationship with her late  brother Gordon whose insipid widow also visits her regularly. Then there’s Laszlo, the teenage Hungarian refugee she befriended in 1956 who becomes effectively part of her family although he’s resented by Lisa, her daughter.

It’s obvious from the first page of this lovely novel what has to happen on the last, although there’s an eleventh hour development which I’d forgotten.  What’s in the middle is a riveting love story and immaculate portrait of a complex woman. Reacquainting myself with Moon Tiger has left me with a thirst to reread all Lively’s other books. Reading is a never ending journey isn’t it?

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: Orlando by Virginia Woolf

I’m a sucker for a short story and often think fondly of the ones I taught to the last couple of GCSE classes I worked with. Opening Worlds was a small anthology published by Heinemann for OCR, the examining board we were using. The good news is that it’s still available from Amazon.

The idea was to offer students literature from different cultures to conform with syllabus (“specification”) requirements. Of course that was a good thing but I was amused (and still am) that only a few years before we’d been firmly told that English Literature means just that and that writing translated from other languages would not do. Several of the stories in Opening Worlds are translations.  The arguments continued and still do. As Education Secretary (2010 to 2014) Michael Gove saw off, or tried to, time-honoured texts such as To Kill a Mockingbird and Of Mice and Men on the grounds that they are American, not English, literature.

Anyway, I’ve just reread Opening Worlds’s twelve stories – with delight. There are some famous names therein: Chinua Achabe, Amy Tan and Anita Desai for example. Alongside them are writers such as Ismith Khan and Khamsing Srinawk whose work I have never encountered in any other context.

There’s an African wedding, a bullied child with a talent for cricket in India, persecution in Maoist China and poverty in Thailand among many other heart rending, sardonic and/or ironic stories which often involve clashing cultures and misunderstandings.

My favourite story is “The Winter Oak” by Yuri Nagibin in which a young Russian school teacher berates her pupil, Savushkin for lateness. Later, she walks home with him through the forest in order to talk to his mother about his time keeping. On the way she discovers, as the child shows her all the natural wonders which routinely slow his walk to school, that he is far better educated than she is. It’s a story which used to lead to good discussions in my classrooms about the purpose of education and how you define it.

It was also a poignant joy to revisit “Leela’s Friend” by RK Narayan. The servant Sidda, adored by the young daughter of the house, is dismissed for theft by the wealthy Indians who employ him. When it transpires that he’s innocent he’s simply dubbed criminal anyway. It’s beautifully told – as Sidda, who is illiterate, entertains the child Leela with imaginative stories about the moon. The final paragraph is devastating.

Feng Ji-cai’s “The Tall Woman and Her Short Husband” punches you in the gut too. It’s effectively a case study about how people’s lives can be ruined by malicious, nosey, self-interested  gossip especially during China’s Cultural Revolution. The titular couple seem an unlikely pair but they’re happy and love each other. That is too much for some people in their collective and gradually the couple are destroyed although, in a sense,  their decency and devotion triumphs.

Please don’t be put off by the fact that this is a school anthology. Every single one of these stories is, in its way, a gem and they certainly weren’t written for children or “young adults”.  As a collection it does what is says on the tin too. I guarantee you’ll learn a lot about other cultures and issues.

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: Moon Tiger by Penelope Lively