I haven't read the Orsinia works, but I enjoyed Le Guin's first three Earthsea books a lot (haven't read the others yet). They tend to be fairly personal stories about individuals coming to terms with their personal failing's and trying to find balance. The world is also interesting, it feels varied and lived in (she also has an enjoyable take on the ancient unknowable horror trope).
Here's a enjoyable (to me, at least) short story of hers that you can read online (neither in the Earthsea or Orsinia setting):
One particular thing about the Earthsea series that impressed me was something I don't want to spoiler for others, yet which I think I can describe somewhat. Fairly early on, a basic feature of the world and how it worked was introduced, and I just recoiled. It so offended my poetic and rational expectations that I considered it a major flaw, until I got a few books further in. Then it was revealed that the feature was actually wrong, a symptom of damage that evil sorcery had wrought on the world, which fact had passed from the memory of many Earthsea people. Of course having reading that, and discovered a foreshadowing that took decades (from 1968 to 2001) to be fulfilled, I now consider it a major strength of the series.
I think the young Le Guin just needed to build the mythology and cosmology to set up her fantasy world for the Earthsea stories. And hers isn't really so different from the cosmology/theology in some actual folklore. So she just set it up and went on telling the actual Sparrowhawk stories.
Then decades later she started to think of the implications of the chosen cosmology. They are cruel, but so are some of the actual folklore cosmologies. And then she invented this way to correct the cruel features in the fabric of her cosmology, and to write a very unique novel about it.
I don't see any hints in her pre-2001 Earthsea stories that she'd had intended this feature to be "fixed" later.
I didn't like that. It wasn't foreshadowed, it was a clear example of retcon.
The last Earthsea books are a bit to the first three what the prequels are to Star Wars. They're the author being ashamed of their earlier work, and radically reinterpreting it.
Of course, Ursula Le Guin is a much better writer than George Lucas is a director, so the later books are not exactly bad. But they do retcon on the universe and the message.
The first three Earthsea books were heavy with Taoism, which is of course heavily gender essentialist. So it was a lot about gender roles, but in a complex way. The main character Ged is a celibate man, balancing between "doing" (yang) and "being" (yin). I liked it. I think she managed to take a pretty sexist world-view (Taoism) and make it more human, sympathetic - and balanced, ironically enough.
But in the latter books, she apparently didn't think she had been feminist enough. The villains are all men. The victims are all women. Ged now stabs a guy with a pitchfork to save a woman, stops being celibate (with the woman he saved...), I mean, come on. I think it went the wrong way entirely when it came to gender roles.
Here's a enjoyable (to me, at least) short story of hers that you can read online (neither in the Earthsea or Orsinia setting):
http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/the-island-of-the-...