Orlando: Genre 1 key example

Orlando is inspired by the real figure of Vita Sackville-West, Woolf's longtime lover and friend—but the narrative takes creative liberties that diverge sharply from the reality of Sackville-West's life. Although Orlando employs an anonymous third-person narrator to tell the life story of Orlando, the narrator regularly interrupts the narrative with subjective anecdotes and a comedic tone of self-awareness. The narrator is aware of expectations placed upon them to write a biography in a supposedly proper fashion—and repeatedly informs the reader of this pressure. As a modernist author of the 1920s, Woolf not only defies conventions of genre and literature but also conventions of socially acceptable content.

With its titular character undergoing a sudden sex change, engaging in passionate relationships with both men and women, and defying scientific laws of space and time, Orlando was a risky title for publishers in the 1920s. However, unlike other openly queer novels of the era (such as Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness), Orlando was never legally banned. Woolf's mixing of clever modernist satire with a traditional adherence to the biographical genre places Orlando at a unique position in the English literary canon. For that matter, the novel could also be categorized as an exaggerated and drawn- out bildungsroman, given its emphasis on Orlando's coming-of-age and and early adult years.