Orlando

Virginia Woolf

Jul 2012 · Random House

About this ebook

Virginia Woolf's most unusual and fantastic creation, a funny, exuberant tale that examines the very nature of sexuality.

WITH INTRODUCTIONS BY PETER ACKROYD AND MARGARET REYNOLDS

As his tale begins, Orlando is a passionate young nobleman whose days are spent in rowdy revelry, filled with the colourful 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 not only witness the making of history from its edge, but will find that his unique position as a woman who knows what it is to be a man will give him insight into matters of the heart.

The Vintage Classics Virginia Woolf series has been curated by Jeanette Winterson and Margaret Reynolds, and the texts used are based on the original Hogarth Press editions published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf.

**One of the BBC’s 100 Novels That Shaped Our World**

Ratings and reviews

This book is very hard to describe. It's beautifully written and full of insightful observations about human life. It feels like magical realism but was written long before that genre became mainstream. And, even though it was written nearly a hundred years ago, ORLANDO is so on target about gender fluidity and gender identity that it reads like 21st century commentary. Witty, intelligent, definitely a book to make you think.

The tale of the long long life of Orlando. Written as an extended love letter to Vita Sackville-West.

As beautiful as I was told it would be. So fascinating in its writing, so blistering and brash in its form. I'll be buying a hardcopy of this, of that you can be sure.

About the author

Virginia Woolf (Author)
Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) was born in London. She became a central figure in The Bloomsbury Group, an informal collective of British writers, artists and thinkers. In 1912 Virginia married Leonard Woolf, a writer and social reformer. She wrote many works of literature which are now considered masterpieces, including Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Orlando, and The Waves.

Margaret Reynolds (Introducer)
Margaret Reynolds is a writer, academic, critic and broadcaster. Her critical edition of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh won the British Academy's Rose Mary Crawshay prize. Other books include The Penguin Book of Lesbian Short Stories, The Sappho Companion, Victorian Women Poets: An Anthology (with Angela Leighton) and a series of study guides on contemporary writers, Vintage Living Texts. She is Professor of English at Queen Mary, University of London and a Life Member of Clare Hall, Cambridge. She is the presenter of BBC Radio 4's long running 'Adventures in Poetry'.

Peter Ackroyd (Introducer)
Peter Ackroyd is an award-winning historian, biographer, novelist, poet and broadcaster. He is the author of the acclaimed non-fiction bestsellers London: The Biography, Thames: Sacred River and London Under; biographies of figures including Charles Dickens, William Blake, Charlie Chaplin and Alfred Hitchcock; and a multi-volume history of England. He has won the Whitbread Biography Award, the Royal Society of Literature's William Heinemann Award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the Guardian Fiction Prize, the Somerset Maugham Award and the South Bank Prize for Literature. He holds a CBE for services to literature.