Woolf is able to set up such a situation for her protagonist because of the pivotal moment in the book, Orlando's sex-change. Everything that happens until that point is quite feasible (with the exception of the rapid passage of time), and seems afterwards to have been in preparation for Orlando's transformation and the way she deals with it. In order for us to read Orlando, we must suspend our disbelief, put feeling first, and forget about the syntax of things. We must pretend there's no such thing as disbelief, as Orlando herself seems to. The transformation happens quite suddenly, literally at the sound of a trumpet. Orlando is in the seventh day of a trance he's fallen into during his time in Turkey. Three ladies enter the room, Our Lady of Purity, Our Lady of Chastity, and Our Lady of Modesty. They dance around Orlando's body, begging, "Truth, come not out from your horrid den. Hide deeper, fearful Truth. For you flaunt in the brutal gaze of the sun things that were better unknown and undone; you unveil the shameful; the dark you make clear. Hide! Hide! Hide!" But "the trumpets, meanwhile, still blare forth: 'The Truth and nothing but the Truth.'"

Woolf is suggesting here that the so-called virtues of Purity, Chastity, and Modesty can sometimes cloud our eyes from the Truth. Truth is "horrid," shameful, ugly. Is it virtue that kept Orlando's "Truth" from being revealed, the Truth that beyond her external male form, she was a woman? Orlando is a biography of the psyche acted out in reality. Woolf's parody of the style of biography-writing popular during the time of Orlando's publication commands a certain amount of order and organization. Indeed, the novel is organized, taking us through Orlando's life in an extremely chronological fashion, but how long this trip takes requires another suspension of our disbelief. Orlando ages less than 20 years over the span of nearly three centuries, and the reader is supposed to accept it without question. The passage of time hits us rather like womanhood hit Orlando--suddenly--and rather unlike the way womanhood hit Orlando--surprisingly. In some part it is subtle, so subtle that we don't even realize a century has passed until the biographer makes some comment about what monarch is on the throne, or the actual date itself. In other parts, it's more obvious, as at the end of Chapter Four, when the biographer narrates the turn of the century:

With the twelfth stroke of midnight, the darkness was complete. A turbulent welter of cloud covered the city. All was dark; all was doubt; all was confusion. The Eighteenth century was over; the Nineteenth century had begun.

At this point in the book, I began to think that Orlando was incapable of the emotion of surprise, for this did not unsettle her at all.