ABSTRACT
This chapter traces how Virginia Woolf weaves depictions of climate change throughout her novel Orlando (1928). Though not written as an overtly Anthropocene novel, Orlando draws upon ideas and imagery popular in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century climate writing, including postapocalyptic fiction and the writings of John Ruskin. When viewed through an ecofeminist lens, these depictions of climate change reflect very real environmental changes and connect to what readers typically see as the novel’s major theme: gender. Woolf’s deconstruction of commonly accepted binaries like male/female and humanity/nature illustrates the instability of gender, as well as Woolf’s own anxiety and growing uncertainty of the new Anthropocene epoch, where such binaries no longer make sense.
