Outline of Orlando

Updated October 17, 2000
Created July 31, 1998

Chapter 1 (pp. 13-64): Orlando in the Age of Elizabeth I (r. 1558-1603) and
James I (r. 1603-25)

The 16 year old boy Orlando is swinging a sword at the shrunken head of a Moor in the opening scene. Then he rushes to meet Queen Elizabeth, who two years later makes him a courtier and confers on him the Order of the Garter. On the way to meet the queen, he spies a shabby poet in the servant’s quarters.

In London, the queen embraces him in her private rooms and declares "This is my victory!" (24). Later Orlando falls out of favor when suspected of kissing another woman at court. He begins to go incognito among the lower classes but soon tired of the discomforts and primitive manners ("for it has to be remembered that crime and poverty had none of the attraction for the Elizabethan that they have for us" 30-31).

He returns to court (now the court of James I), dallies with various ladies in waiting, and is soon engaged to the Lady "Euphrosyne." However, the Great Frost freezes the Thames and Orlando is intrigued by a skater whose gender is ambiguous. She turns out to be a Russian Princess, Marousha Stanliovska Dagmar Natasha Iliana Romanovitch, niece of the Muscovite ambassador, whose ship has been frozen in. Orlando falls in love, nicknames her Sasha (after a pet Russian fox he once had), and grows jealous when he thinks he sees her with a Russian sailor. Seeing a performance of Othello on the frozen Thames, Orlando sympathizes with the jealous lover. Sasha and Orlando plan to run away together, but as he waits for her, the ice melts and the Russian ship sails away. "Standing knee deep in water he hurled at the faithless woman all the insults that have ever been the lot of her sex" (64).

Chapter 2 (pp. 65-118): Orlando the Poet (through reign of Charles II, 1660-85)

Returned to his huge house in the country, Orlando sleeps for 7 days and wakes without memory of the recent past. He becomes morbidly interested in reading and writing: producing "before he was turned twenty-five, some forty-seven plays, histories, romances poems . . . all romantic, and all long" (77). He turns to the shortest one, a play called "The Oak Tree." Recalling the poet he had seen in chapter 1, he seeks advice from an admired poet, Nick Greene, whom he brings from London to his country home. Orlando finds Greene disappointing and largely motivated by money, though he seeks to write only for "Glawr" (Greene’s pronunciation of the French "La Gloire," glory). Greene returns to London and writes a satire mocking Orlando. Orlando keeps his promise of "a pension of three hundred pounds a year paid quarterly" (90), but vows "I have done with men" (96). He is now age 30 and burns all his writings except "The Oak Tree" (now a poem).

He turns his mind to furnishing his huge house (365 bedrooms). Then, to escape pursuit by the Archduchess Harriet of Roumania, who says he reminds her of her dead sister, Orlando asks the king to send him as ambassador to Constantinople.

Chapter 3 (pp. 119-52):  Ambassador, Duke, Woman, Gypsy

Orlando’s daily ritual in Constantinople is described (120-24). He is in "the prime of life" but has made no friends, formed no attachments. At a big party at his ambassadorial home, Orlando receives royal honors: a dukedom and the Order of the Bath. The details are reported from letters and diaries of people attending. Afterward, Orlando falls into another 7-day sleep during which 1) his aides find a marriage certificate between Orlando and a gypsy dancer named Pepita, and 2) on day 7, an uprising creates anarchy in the country. When Orlando awakes, he has become a woman, although "in every other respect, Orlando remained precisely as he had been" (138)

Orlando puts on an androgynous Turkish costume and goes to live with the gypsies. All goes well until she begins to work on her poem again and the gypsies suspect her of nature worship. They are planning to kill her when she decides to go home to England

Chapter 4 (pp. 153-226): Age of Reason, Queen Anne (r. 1702-14) through Boswell and Johnson (~1795), "life and a lover"

Aboard ship, Orlando wears women’s clothes for the first time and ponders the benefits of being one or the other sex. Back in London, it is the 18th century and Orlando finds herself party to lawsuits claiming she is dead and cannot hold title to her property, or she is a woman ("which amounts to much the same thing"), and that the sons of Rosina Pepita are claiming her property.

Back at her country home, she contemplates her past and concludes "I am growing up. . . . I am losing my illusions, perhaps to acquire new ones" (175). She begins again on "The Oak Tree" and is interrupted by the Archduke Harry, who says he had disguised himself as a woman ( chapter 2, Archduchess Harriet) to court him. He proposes marriage and Orlando gets rid of him by cheating at a game she makes up and then dropping a toad down his shirt.

The biographer points out ways Orlando is taking on feminine attributes, such as hiding her manuscripts and looking long into mirrors.

Orlando spends time with writers Addison, Pope, and Swift, whose misogyny wears on her. She entertains herself by going out at night dressed as a man. There she picks up a prostitute named Nell (217 ff), who introduces her to her friends Prue, Kitty, and Rose. They invite her to joing their secret society in which they tell stories about their lives. Orlando "enjoyed the love of both sexes equally" (221).

She attends many parties and becomes bored until getting an invitation from Lady R--, where she hopes to meet poets. She brings home Pope and begins to spend time with "men of genius," such as Addison, Pope, and Swift, though never at the same time nor in salon society. They prove to be "not much different from other people" ( 208). She meets Boswell and Johnson, and then a dark cloud over London heralds the end of the 18th century, beginning of the 19th century

Chapter 5 (pp. 227-62): Love and Marriage (19th century)

The climate becomes very damp and women begin to have 15 to 20 children. Orlando decides to end her work on "The Oak Tree," which she has been writing for 300 years, but instead finds herself blotting the page and writing insipid verse (238-39). The second finger of her left hand begins to tingle and she decides she should be married like everyone else ("everyone is mated except myself" 246), though first she just tries wearing a wedding band because "the cry that rose to her lips was ‘Life! A Lover!’ not ‘Life! A Husband!’ . . . But the spirit of the nineteenth century was antipathetic to her in the extreme, and thus it took her and broke her, and she was aware of her defeat at its hands as she had never been before" (243-44).

Seeking to find her mate in nature, she runs onto the moors, falls and breaks her ankle, and declares "I am nature’s bride" (248), but then a man on a horse gallops up, leaps to the ground, and within minutes they are engaged.

Shortly after the engagement, he tells her his name, Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine. Soon, the lawsuits are settled, the Turkish marriage annulled, and Lord Palmerston (prime minister in 1855 and 1859-65) declares her a woman. She is now in "undisturbed possession of her titles, her house, and her estate . . . infinitely noble again [but because of the lawsuits] she was also excessively poor" (255). Shel and Orlando repeatedly suspect each other of not being the sex they profess (258) because each has so many good qualities of the opposite sex. She marries Shel on the day the wind rises, signalling his ship’s sailing to Cape Horn.

Chapter 6 (263-329)  Motherhood (late Victorian moving into 20th century)

In Shel’s absence, Orlando questions whether her marriage is real and whether "if one still wished, more than anything in the whole world, to write poetry, was it marriage?" (264). She tests this by taking up her pen again [here is quoted part of Vita’s prize-winning poem "The Land", p. 265). "The Oak Tree," which she has carried in her bosom for centuries, now takes on life and says it wants to be read (272), so she finds her old friend Nick Greene (now Sir Nicholas) in London, "the most influential critic of the Victorian age" (277). He agrees to publish "The Oak Tree." Walking in Hyde Park, she meditates on the relation of life and literature (285-88) and finds meaning and ecstasy in a toy boat. She orders lots of books and begins reading to find out what literature has become in the Victorian age and is disappointed (291).

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