Orlando
A poet lives for more than three centuries, becomes a woman, and ages only twenty years in this classic fantastical work by the author of Mrs. Dalloway.
Orlando begins their story as a melancholy sixteen-year-old nobleman and poet who spends their days in the court of Queen Elizabeth I, who takes a shine to them. Love, passion, and heartbreak guide Orlando’s life through two more kings. In their thirties, Orlando becomes an ambassador to Turkey and there undergoes an astonishing gender transformation.
Eventually returning to their native England, Orlando embarks on a journey of learning, love, and fulfillment. They cross paths with great literary minds from English history and eventually settles down after three centuries. The story comes to a close in the year 1928 with Orlando now a thirty-six-year-old married woman and published poet.
Cited as an “exuberant romp through history,” Orlando was first originally in 1928. This humorous fictional biography was inspired by the family history of poet and novelist Vita Sackville-West. Sackville-West’s son referred to the novel as “the longest and most charming love letter in literature.”
“A fantasy, impossible but delicious . . . An exuberance of life and wit.” —The Times Literary Supplement
“Once more Mrs. Woolf has broken with tradition and convention and has set out to explore still another fourth dimension of writing. . . . It is something of a question whether the tendency of contemporary novelists to become more and more introspective can profitably be carried much further. If it is to continue, however, Mrs. Woolf has pointed out the direction in which it must develop.” —The New York Times