Recommendations
Books Like Orlando
Best books to read after Orlando by Virginia Woolf
Orlando is Woolf at her most playful and most subversive — a four-century biography of a person who changes sex in the middle, organized around the question of what gender is and what time does to a self. If the novel's formal wit and its feminist argument moved you, these books share its playfulness about biographical form, its concern with gender as a performance, and its conviction that the inner life transcends the categories the outer world imposes.
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Buy on AmazonMrs Dalloway
by Virginia Woolf
The essential companion — Woolf's stream-of-consciousness masterpiece, published the year before Orlando; the contrast between Clarissa Dalloway's single day and Orlando's four centuries shows the full range of Woolf's formal possibilities and the seriousness underlying Orlando's comedy
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Buy on AmazonTo the Lighthouse
by Virginia Woolf
Woolf's masterpiece in seriousness — the emotional depth that Orlando approaches through comedy; the Ramsay family's two days across ten years is the companion to Orlando's four centuries in showing how Woolf approaches the question of what time does to people
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Buy on AmazonThe Passion of New Eve
by Angela Carter
Carter's feminist science fiction novel about a man who is surgically transformed into a woman in a dystopian near-future America — the most direct contemporary parallel to Orlando's central conceit; shares Orlando's use of the gender transformation as a way of examining what society does to people based on their sex
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Buy on AmazonA Room of One's Own
by Virginia Woolf
Woolf's extended essay on women and fiction, published the year after Orlando — the non-fiction companion that makes explicit the argument Orlando makes through comedy and fantasy; essential reading alongside Orlando for understanding what Woolf was arguing about the suppression of women's creative lives
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Buy on AmazonTrumpet
by Jackie Kay
Kay's novel about a jazz musician who is revealed after death to have been a woman — organized around the community's varying responses to this revelation — is the most direct contemporary heir to the tradition Orlando belongs to; both novels are concerned with how gender shapes what others see when they look at us
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Possession
by A.S. Byatt
Byatt's Booker Prize-winning novel about two academics who discover a secret love affair between two Victorian poets — the most celebrated contemporary exploration of the same territory Orlando covers: the relationship between literary history, biography, and gender; the pastiche element shares Orlando's playfulness about literary form
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Buy on AmazonThe Waves
by Virginia Woolf
The radical companion — Woolf's most experimental novel, following Orlando chronologically; where Orlando plays with time and gender through comedy, The Waves explores time through pure interiority; together they show the two extremes of Woolf's formal range
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Buy on AmazonGiovanni's Room
by James Baldwin
Baldwin's novel about an American man in Paris who cannot acknowledge his love for Giovanni — the most important companion in the queer literary tradition to which Orlando also belongs; both are novels about the impossibility of living authentically when social convention demands you perform an identity that is not your own
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