Orlando

About this book

Virginia Woolfs exuberant biography tells the story of the cross-dressing sex-changing Orlando who begins life as a young noble in the sixteenth century and moves through numerous historical and geographical worlds to finish as a modern woman writer in the 1920s. The book is in part a happy tribute to the life that her love for Vita Sackville-West had breathed into Virginia Woolfs own day-to-day existence; it is also Woolfs light-hearted and light-handed teasing out of the assumptions that lie behind the normal conventions for writing about a fictional or historical life. In this novel Virginia Woolf plays loose and fast: Orlando uncovers a literary and sexual revolution overnight.