Virginia Woolf's Orlando in eight objects

This study offers a rare opportunity to read Virginia Woolf’s famed mock-biography, Orlando, with Karina Jakubowicz, Woolf scholar and creator of The Virginia Woolf Podcast. Readers will be guided through the text step-by-step, explaining the desires, jealousies and rivalries behind what has been called ‘the longest love letter in the English language.’ There will be opportunities to discuss Woolf’s inspiration, Vita Sackville West, and to consider Woolf’s treatment of history, gender and the genre of biography.

To guide our readings, each week will feature one object drawn from the archives at Knole House or Sissinghurst Castle, or from Virginia Woolf’s own collections. Orlando is a story that spans 400 years, so each object will relate to the time period that we are looking at in the text itself. These pieces may simply serve as bookmarks to help readers navigate the text, or they may develop into talking points that furnish our understanding of the history that Woolf describes. 

The eight-session study will begin with a lecture on the background to the text that can be booked as a standalone event or as part of the whole. The following seven sessions will be discussion-based and split according to the timetable below.

Session 1: Lecture

Session 2: Preface and first half of Chapter 1, up to the beginning of The Great Frost (p. 22)

Session 3: Read until the end of Chapter 1

Session 4: Chapter 2.

Session 5: Chapter 3

Session 6: Chapter 4

Session 7: Chapter 5

Session 8: Chapter 6 

N.B. If you are interested in developing your critical or written skills, this can be done via a weekly written task with feedback at additional cost. For more information on this, please email us using the subject line ‘Orlando feedback’. 

JOINING DETAILS:

• Eight meeting study on Zoom led by Karina Jakubowicz
• 27 January to 17 March 2025
• Mondays, 6.00-8.00 pm
• £30 for the lecture alone, £240 for the whole course
• Recommended edition: Oxford World’s Classics, edited by Michael H. Whitworth, ISBN: 9780199650736 (but any decent edition will work).