For each was so surprised at the quickness of the other’s sympathy, and it was to each such a revelation that a woman could be as tolerant and free-spoken a a man, and a man as strange and subtle as a woman, that they had put the matter to the proof at once.

This book feels like falling into the world's slowest flowing whirlpool. Here it is funny; there it is baffling; here it is magical; there it is lovely; yet most of the time a little too meandering for my liking. But I still had fun reading it. Kind of feels like a queer fairytale. Queer in the gendered sense but also in the literal sense of the word, like, Peculiar. Very sharp commentary abt sexuality. Would love a crossover episode between Tristram Shandy and this novel's biographer-narrator. Cheers Orlando.