Orlando

This started out as much too broad of a satire for my tastes; I simply found the comedy too silly, too slapstick to be taken seriously. When satire is hidden underneath slapstick, it may not retain enough of its shape to still be recognizable. Yet ever-so-slowly it metamorphosed, becoming more and more serious, subtly sly, biting, although without ever moving away from its joyful air of mischief. The amazing concept of telling an emotional biography as ridiculous fiction is so startling. To interweave insight and empathy and caring within this comic adventure! This is biography as psychological reimagining, as playacting. There is so much reality hiding under the satire. Mostly this is about the compromises a woman (unlike a man) is forced to make with the "spirit of her time" in order to be a writer, and to that extent I can only imagine that Virginia Woolf had a lot of personal experience to draw on. Her musings about the differences between the genders are priceless!