How many sentences does it take to change Orlando? Or – how many to make Orlando? Even in this present age of digital marvels, post-Orlando though probably not post-Orlando, those might not be straightforward questions to answer. Word counts are the everyday background of writing (just click on the tool or look at the bottom of the screen). Distracting, depressing, whatever. But sentence counts? Unknown. That might be because a sentence, for all its supposed simplicity of appearance and definition – the upper-case start, the full-stop end; the subject and the indicative verb – is a little more doubtful a being than a word.

Like the one I just wrote.

Or like this!

Or, like Orlando's three-word incantation, on her final-day visit to the London department store, Marshall & Snelgrove’s: ‘boys’ boots, bath salts, sardines’. It's clamped between dashes, a mini-citation in the middle of a proper sentence, and it's evidently not – so we later learn – a complete recitation of the text that she holds in her hands. Later, the one thing she does buy, just because it is there (on the list) and there (where she happens to be in the store), is bed linen: ‘And indeed, she was about to descend again, without buying anything, but was saved from that outrage by saying aloud automatically the last item on her list, which happened to be “sheets for a double bed”’ (O 287).

A list is not a sentence (though ‘A list is not a sentence’ is). But other than a few gleanings from her (and his) poem ‘The Oak Tree’, this minimal shopping list is Orlando's only example or sample of Orlando's writing. Boys’ boots, bath salts, sardines. Oh, and sheets for a double bed. Canonical, clearly.

But let's look into it a little further. For some reason, Orlando has decided to buy these various things in a grand store in the centre of London. Well, each to his own. Or hers. The sheets, sure, yes, you could understand. Only the best for a stately home. Especially when they haven't been changed for hundreds of years. But sardines? What's wrong with the local shops? Later, she even passes through the town on her car journey home from London. There's talk on the narrator's part of market day and mention, even, of the fishmonger’s, can you believe (O 298).