Word: orlando
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1920-1929
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Early Seventeenth Century. Came the Great Frost: the new King celebrated his coronation with an ice carnival on the frozen Thames, and there Orlando fell passionately in love with a Muscovite Princess. His verse likened her to a pineapple, an emerald, a fox in the snow; and for weeks their bliss was the gossip of the icebound court. Then she jilted him, and he went into a trance...
Middle Seventeenth Century. Writer-folk had always filled him with awe: he patronized a hack-writer till the scurrilous wag wrote a lucrative burlesque on his patron's foppish existence. King Charles thereupon gave Orlando escape as Ambassador Extraordinary to Constantinople though Nell Gwyn regretted that such a pair of legs should leave the country...
Eighteenth Century. Returned to England in skirts, Orlando attended Queen Anne's brilliant balls; flirted with Mr. Pope, sipped tea with Addison and Steele, reflecting that future generations, little guessing her boredom, would envy her the intimacy...
Nineteenth Century. Victoria's cream-colored ponies trotted up the avenue with a command for Orlando to dine; Lady Palmerston and Mrs. Gladstone left cards, but bored Orlando withdrew to the woods with her lover. True, she solemnly married him and bore her first child?but such was the irresistible convention of the crinoline...
...bold conception might well fall short of artistic execution, but Mrs. Woolf is a craftsman of great skill. The mechanics of sex-transformation and passage of time are deftly, almost blandly, subordinated to the phenomenon of one and the same temperament reacting to the characteristics of disparate ages. Orlando is influenced by each new mode, but vivid memories give him (her) a dispassionate perspective. The sweep of generations offers every opportunity for satiric commentary; the experience of both sexes an admirable occasion for comparison. Mrs. Woolf seizes opportunity and occasion...