#ef benson

Orlando (1928) by Virginia Woolf

Endorsement from submitter #1: "Ugh Orlando deals with gender identity in such an interesting way: Orlando, a person living over several centuries, is born as a man and one night transforms into a woman. This is pretty much not commented by the people around her, but does affect her life and freedom. Amazing book and I adore Woolfs writing style"

Endorsement from submitter #2: "Funny, strange, boundary-crossing"

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.

Classics, literary fiction, historical fiction, experimental

David Blaize (1916) by E.F. Benson

Memorably evoking the joys and torments of boyhood, from midnight feasts and glorious days on the cricket field to waxy masters and hilariously embarrassing parental visits, E. F. Benson follows young David Blaize from prep school to Marchester College.

David Blaize is the son of an archdeacon, the friend of a bishop's nephew, and this is a story of their friendship and life at a public school. Possibly the tale may be reminiscent of the author's own youth. It tells of cleanliness, physical and moral, of the self-restraint learned from one another by boys who were to be among the future leaders in England.