In 1928, way before everyone else was talking about gender-bending and way, way before the terrific movie with Tilda Swinton, Virginia Woolf wrote her comic masterpiece, a fantastic, fanciful love letter disguised as a biography, to Vita Sackville-West. Orlando enters the book as an Elizabethan nobleman and leaves the book three centuries and one change of gender later as a liberated woman of the 1920s. Along the way this most rambunctious of Woolf's characters engages in sword fights, trades barbs with 18th century wits, has a baby, and drives a car. This is a deliriously written, breathless-making book and a classic both of lesbian literature and the Western canon.
Orlando: A Biography ANNOTATION
A fictional biography--spanning three centuries in the life of an Elizabethan nobleman who becomes a woman.
FROM THE PUBLISHER
As his tale begins, Orlando is a passionate young nobleman whose days are spent in rowdy revelry, filled with the colorful delights of Queen Elizabeth's court. By the close, he will have transformed into a modern, thirty-six-year-old woman and three centuries will have passed. Orlando will witness the making of history from its edge, dressing in the flamboyant fashions of each day, following passing customs, and socializing with celebrated artists and writers. Orlando's journey will also be an internal one -- he is an impulsive poet who learns patience in matters of the heart, and a woman who knows what it is to be a man. Virginia Woolf's most unusual and fantastic creation, Orlando is a funny, exuberant romp through history that examines the true nature of sexuality.
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