Penguin Clothbound Classics, 336 pages
English language
Published Oct. 27, 2016 by Penguin Classics.
Virginia Woolf's Orlando 'The longest and most charming love letter in literature', playfully constructs the figure of Orlando as the fictional embodiment of Woolf's close friend and lover, Vita Sackville-West. Spanning three centuries, the novel opens as Orlando, a young nobleman in Elizabeth's England, awaits a visit from the Queen and traces his experience with first love as England under James I lies locked in the embrace of the Great Frost. At the midpoint of the novel, Orlando, now an ambassador in Constantinople, awakes to find that he is a woman, and the novel indulges in farce and irony to consider the roles of women in the 18th and 19th centuries. As the novel ends in 1928, a year consonant with full suffrage for women. Orlando, now a wife and mother, stands poised at the brink of a future that holds new hope and promise for women.
Orlando is the fictional biography of an Elizabethan nobleman who becomes a woman and lives on into the 20th century, where they quickly become adept at road rage. For all its weirdness, this is one of the more accessible of Woolf’s novels. Among other things, the story examines the nature of gender, of sexuality, and (since Orlando is a poet) of literature. Be prepared to stumble over moments of casual racism.
