Status Updates From Orlando

It may have been her love of poetry that was to blame for making Orlando lose her shopping list and start home without the sardines

- which proves tgat if you want to have your sardines and eat them, that you are best off skipping the poetry, also that sardines are the most literary of all fish.

Since she is a woman, & a beautiful woman, & a woman in the prime of life

- at this point in the narrative she is over 300 years old which suggests that Jean Brody was amazingly premature in reaching her prime

But the spirit of the 19th century was antipathetic to her in the extreme, & thus it took her & broke her, & she was aware of her defeat at its hands as she had never been before. For it is probable that the human spirit has its place in time assigned to it; some are born of this age, some of that...

Verde na natureza é uma coisa, verde na literatura é outra. A natureza e as letras parecem ter uma antipatia natural; junte as duas e elas se despedaçam. O tom de verde que Orlando viu estragou sua rima e rompeu sua métrica. Além disso, a natureza tem seus próprios truques. Basta olhar pela janela as abelhas entre as flores, um cachorro bocejando, o pôr do sol, basta pensar quantos sóis mais verei se porem

Reference to Madame du Deffand, quick I must loosen my clothes, fan myself and pray that somebody brings me smelling salts because Woof reveals herself to be at least a degree less insular than I had thought!

...bore out the belief that she was, by birth, one of them and had been snatched by an English Duke from a nut tree when she was a baby and then taken to that barbarous land where people live in houses because they are too feeble and diseased to stand the open air.

- what the gypsies think of Orlando and England.

Para V. Sackville West

Orlando was a man till the age of thirty...

- he was present at the court of Elizabeth I (ie before 1603) and is ambassador during the reign of Charles II (ie after 1660) so he ought to be between 80 and 90 years old rather than thirty. I wonder if it would help to read puck of pook's hill to contextualise this, or is she simply dynamiting her father's lifetime work on the Dictionary of National Biography?

Orlando had become a woman there is no denying it. But in every other respect, Orlando remained precisely as he had been.

- is this the jumping off point for Harpman's Orlanda?

Hmph. Second mention of tunbridge wells. Which didn't exist as a tiwn at the time when the narrative is unfolding. Presumably like the illustrations stressing the fictional potential of biography and history?