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Over the years during which the material for this paper has been accumulating, I have frequently thought back to Virginia Woolf's Orlando (V. Woolf, 1928)—a book of moving beauty and sadness, a book whose tragedy was underscored by the ultimate suicide of one of the greatest and subtlest creative writers of our day. It is a book in which the beauty of woman and the strength of man are blended in courage and despair, and in which the depths of lechery are interspersed with high spiritual creativity. It is a story written by a woman about a man who turns into a woman and then back and forth between the two, but without ever losing completely his hold on maleness. Implicit and almost explicit in this tale is much that I will try to say in this paper.
In Orlando, as in life itself, the unresolved residues of each day's unfinished business produce a fusion of reality and dream, of incompatible, unattainable, and irreconcilable goals. It transcends time and space, as adventures occur almost simultaneously in England and in Turkey, and in the sixteenth and twentieth centuries (1528 to 1928). And as it fuses man and woman, so it fuses prose and verse. There are passages which pass from verse to prose and from prose to verse without a break