Product Description

Virginia Woolf's 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 Woolf's own day-to-day existence; it is also Woolf's 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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #3138 in Books
• Published on: 1995-02-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 192 pages

Synopsis
With an introduction and notes by Merry M. Pawlowski, Professor and Chair, Department of English, California State University, BakersfieldVirginia 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 Costantinople, 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.

Customer Reviews

A funny fictional biography
I had to study this book in the first year of my degree. I am very glad of this, as I might not have encountered this amusing and original work of Woolf's otherwise. The tone of 'Orlando' is quite different to that of her other well-known novels such as 'To The Lighthouse' and 'Mrs Dalloway' - I would say that it is more 'accessible'. Despite its somewhat surreal plot (a sixteenth-century nobleman ends up as a twentieth-century female writer), the historical periods are described with realistic detail, and the reader's perceptions are challenged throughout. The themes of gender, race, truth, art and freedom, which are prevalent in the book, are still as relevant today as they were in 1928.

The Oxford World's Classics edition is well worth buying over cheaper ones; not only is the cover pleasant to look at, but there is a wealth of extra material in the form of notes, a pictorial insert, a lengthy bibliography, and an interesting and useful introduction. Highly recommended!

Milord! Milady!
This `roman à clés' is very original. The hero continues to live in different historical periods and undergoes a sex change.
However, it is written in an emotional, sentimental, superlative style: `society in the reign of Queen Anne was of unparalleled brilliance. The graces were supreme.'
Except for the first period, there are no conflicts, only rather superficial descriptions of the mood and spirits of the times. For V. Woolf, `to give a truthful account of society ... only those who have little need of the truth, and no respect for it - the poets and novelists - can be trusted to do it, for this is one of the causes where the truth does not exist.'
`Orlando' is a perfect flight from reality: `But let other pens treat of sex and sexuality; we quit such odious subjects as soon as we can.' `Whigs and Tories, Liberal party and Labour party ... should be left to the historian.'

This book is a clean, introvert, aristocratic, long ode to pure Beauty.
Only for Virginia Woolf fans.

Without doubt the very worst book I have ever had the displeasure of reading.
I MUST be missing something. I am widely read, am in the middle of a degree in literature, and all of a sudden as part of my studies I have to read this mindless drivel. I can only guess that it is a kind of Emperors New Clothes test, where they see if you just blindly agree that because a famous author(es) wrote it, it must be good.

The plot, if you call it such, is of a man who lives the first half of his life courting women and having numerous affairs, with very little else happening, aside from a continuing struggle to write a poem. Suddenly he wakes up one morning with the body and mind of a woman. She then survives for many hundreds of years, yet is only around 35 years old herself. She marries, the husband instantly leaving to sail to the Horn, and well over a year later she suddenly gives birth to a child whilst looking out of the window. Bored yet? You will be.

Had it not been a requirement of my next course to study this utter rubbish, I would have put it down unfinished a long time ago. All I am left with now is the feeling of having been cheated out of several hours of my life, and the hope that I will be able to avoid having to study it in any greater detail when that part of the course comes round.

Without doubt the very worst book I have ever had the displeasure of reading.