Woolf is hardly the first (or last) writer to observe that the self is a performance, and one's place in the social fabric of its moment the stage, but has anyone else said so in such a farcical and lovestruck and playfully sprawling and profoundly soul-baring manner? She's like a conversationally academic Emily Bronte; overflowing with intangible mysticism, death-infused longing, elastic structural waltzes, and those motherfucking semicolons. If you can name a faster rushing literary whirlpool than the end of chapter 5 you're either a fool or trying to sell me something. 

Would that I could summarise this achievement with just one example, but here's a real corker. In continuing with the book's obsession with time as a subjective and experiential concept, a leaf falling from a tree onto Orlando's foot becomes a visualisation of the time dilation caused by two personalities achieving perfect harmony ("and if a leaf fell, it fell, spotted red and gold, so slowly that one could watch it for half an hour fluttering and falling till it came to rest at last, on Orlando's foot). A couple pages later, we move on from this conversation, "Orlando's feet fairly covered with spotted Autumn leaves." Woolf is never content with just a beautiful image, instead cultivating vibrant and active environments detailed down to the smallest scraps of shrubbery on the ground. Ultra-mongo masterpiece.