SOURCE: "Virginia Woolf, Orlando, and the Feminist Spirit," in The Western Humanities Review, Vol. XV, No. 1, Winter, 1961, pp. 51-8.

In the following excerpt, Samuelson discusses Woolf's "defiant feminist spirit" in Orlando.

Orlando is virtually the only work of Virginia Woolf's in which critical questions about her "feminism" have not repeatedly arisen. Moreover, the problem of what "type" of literature it belongs to has been with us since its appearance in 1928. Its method is fantasy, of course; the work begins with Orlando, the hero, a young man during the late 1580s, but in the middle of it all, Orlando's sex magically changes, and the novel ends with Orlando a woman, thirty-six years old, in the late 1920s.

Of this novel, covering more than three hundred year time during which the same person changes from a ma to a woman, most of the critics have suggested that th work is...