Orlando - Virginia Woolf (In-person)

About this event

PLEASE NOTE THE DAY OF THIS MEETING \- we usually meet on the second Wednesday of the month\, but for the foreseeable future\, we will be meeting on the second Tuesday of each month\. This event is supported by The Royal Institute of Philosophy’s Local Partners Programme (https://royalinstitutephilosophy.org/news/fund-your-event/). This meeting will be held in person in the Prince of Wales pub near Covent Garden. There is also an online session held on Thursday if you are not in London or are unable to attend in-person. This month we'll explore our year's theme of 'quest' through the lens of self-understanding, self-transformation, conformity and freedom with Virginia Woolf's Orlando. Expect themes of personal identity, social restrictions, gender and family as we discuss the titular Orlando's unexpected sex-shifting journey from Renaissance nobleman to early 20th century woman. The meeting starts at 7pm with drink breaks at 8 and 9. The discussion will end around 10pm, but leave whenever you need to. Here's the blurb from goodreads.com: Virginia Woolf's Orlando 'The longest and most charming love letter in literature', playfully constructs the figure of Orlando as the fictional embodiment of Woolf's close friend and lover, Vita Sackville-West. Spanning three centuries, the novel opens as Orlando, a young nobleman in Elizabeth's England, awaits a visit from the Queen and traces his experience with first love as England under James I lies locked in the embrace of the Great Frost. At the midpoint of the novel, Orlando, now an ambassador in Constantinople, awakes to find that he is now a woman, and the novel indulges in farce and irony to consider the roles of women in the 18th and 19th centuries. As the novel ends in 1928, a year consonant with full suffrage for women. Orlando, now a wife and mother, stands poised at the brink of a future that holds new hope and promise for women.