Orlando
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First published in 1928, Orlando: A Biography follows the extraordinary life of a young English nobleman who begins his story in the court of Elizabeth I and lives across four centuries of English history. After a mysterious transformation in Constantinople, Orlando awakens as a woman, continuing through the changing worlds of the seventeenth, eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Inspired by Woolf's intimate relationship with the writer Vita Sackville-West, the novel draws upon her life while transforming it into an imaginative exploration of identity, love and desire.
Part historical fantasy, part literary satire, Orlando playfully challenges the conventions of biography, the boundaries of gender and the assumptions through which history is written. With its wit, shifting narrative styles and extraordinary sense of time, Woolf creates a world in which identity remains fluid while society continually changes around it. One of her most inventive and unconventional works, the novel stands as a landmark of feminist and queer literature, celebrating the freedom of imagination and the possibility of being more than one self.
From the book
“Different though the sexes are, they intermix. In every human being a vacillation from one sex to the other takes place.”
— Virginia Woolf, Orlando
On Orlando
“The longest and most charming love-letter in literature.”
— Nigel Nicolson