In his 1926 poem "since feeling is first," e.e. cummings plays with the same thing in verse as many of his contemporaries began to toy with in prose. It begins:

since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;

Cummings disregards the conventionalities of written English, breaking from poetic standards that governed the canonical work that came before his. "since feeling is first" isn't written in logical sentences. He throws the rule book out the window in order to convey his meaning, sacrificing grammatical correctness in order to keep the essence of the poem intact, that since feeling and emotion are the most important things in life, we should not let ourselves be governed by margins and regulations. It's a move from structure to emotion, from storyboard to cinema. Feeling is first; feeling is the star of his production.

Virginia Woolf makes a similar sacrifice in Orlando, a mock-biography based on her real-life lover, Vita Sackville-West. She sacrifices logic and possibility to reflect on gender and sexuality to the degree she felt necessary. Orlando, at the start of the book, is a young man in the Elizabethan court. After much traveling, the passage of much time, and an altogether magical sex change, the book concludes with Orlando as a modern-day (circa 1928) woman in her mid-30s. Throughout it all, Woolf takes us on a deeply introspective and sprawling exploration of gender and sexuality, which is what makes it such an innovative work. Woolf sacrifices the conventions of storytelling in order to say what she needs to say about men, women, and love in the way she wants to say it, the female manner of writing: deeply thoughtful and exquisitely detailed.

Woolf had once said that there were no female writers in the past because there had been no female sentences. Her sentences are the epitome of her gender: contemplative, brooding, drawn-out, complicated, withholding, stalling the revelation of the actual point until the last possible moment, waiting to reveal their meanings until perfectly set up, like a woman who reserves hours of the evening to primp and groom before presenting herself to her husband (or lover, the less loaded term Woolf would have preferred), all the while managing to think about everything in the world. Upon completing it, I decided that she had managed to pack more reflection in three hundred twenty-nine pages than I had managed actually to experience in the eighteen years of my more-pensive-than-most life. The strength if Orlando is evident in not only the way it reads, but the way it affected me. Upon beginning this essay, I noticed that my sentences had grown in length. I had begun writing "female" sentences, subconsciously emulating Woolf's style and technique. Orlando is full of such writing, passages so rich and complicated that I often had to re-read a page four or five times to extract the meaning, or simply just because it sounded so lovely in my head. The work is steeped in her gender.

In Woolf's production, gender is the star, and all other elements of storytelling are subordinated, time included. The entire book is about an individual's ambiguity of gender and how (s)he lives her life within different societies (England during the 16th, 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries, Turkish gypsies during the 17th century), having once been a man, having turned into a woman, and having been in love with and having been pursued by members of both sexes. One particular scene wittily demonstrates the mingling of the two genders within Orlando's newly hermaphroditic persona, a narrative of her dealings with the Archduke Harry, a nobleman who fell in love with a portrait of Orlando as a man and subsequently dressed up as Archduchess Harriet to gain his (Orlando's) affections. When Orlando finally decides to return to England from Turkey (after fleeing there to escape "Harriet's" advances), the Archduchess reveals himself to Orlando as the Archduke and professes his love for her. He proposes to her and asks her to come to Romania with him. Orlando slyly and pseudo-coquettishly (actually just confusedly and clumsily) manages to avoid answering the question, and thus begins the Archduke's painfully long, humiliating, laughable, and fruitless courtship. Orlando, being familiar with the feeling of repellence toward a potential suitor (ironically, toward the same person) but unfamiliar in the way which women are supposed to deal with it, inelegantly rid herself of the Archduke by dropping a toad down his shirt.

Woolf craftily plays with the conventionalities of both sexes in this scene, demonstrating some of the trappings of being a woman, feeling something like disgust toward a member of the opposite sex, but being unable to explicitly state her desires, being constrained by politeness and poise, being unable to voice rejection without looking hasty or rude, being forced to be non-confrontational. But she also displays some of the faults of the male gender: tactlessness, gracelessness, inadvertent cruelty, and disregard for feelings. The juxtaposition of these qualities is what comprises the comedy of this scene, and much of the rest of the book.