Text 1 Virginia Woolf’s 1928 novel Orlando is an oddity within her body of work. Her other major novels consist mainly of scenes of everyday life and describe their characters’ interior states in great detail, whereas Orlando propels itself through a series of fantastical events and considers its characters’ psychology more superficially. Woolf herself sometimes regarded the novel as a minor work, even admitting once that she “began it as a joke.”   Text 2 Like Woolf’s other great novels, Orlando portrays how people’s memories inform their experience of the present. Like those works, it examines how people navigate social interactions shaped by gender and social class. Though it is lighter in tone—more entertaining, even—this literary “joke” nonetheless engages seriously with the themes that motivated the four or five other novels by Woolf that have achieved the status of literary classics.