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Virginia Woolf
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Orlando: (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition) Paperback – 1 February 2005

by Virginia Woolf (Author)
4.3 out of 5 stars 1,446
Edition: 1st
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Virginia Woolf's most unusual and fantastic creation, a funny, exuberant tale that examines the very nature of sexuality.

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**
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  1. ISBN-10
    0099478285
  2. ISBN-13
    978-0099478287
  3. Edition
    1st
  4. Publisher
    VINTAGE ARROW - MASS MARKET
  5. Publication date
    1 February 2005
  6. Language
    English
  7. Dimensions
    14.61 x 0.64 x 20.32 cm
  8. Print length
    256 pages
  9. See all details
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Orlando is the wittiest little book, a pleasure: it makes me laugh every time I read it

Undoubtedly Virginia Woolf's most intense and one of the most singular [novels] of our era

Book Description

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

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ VINTAGE ARROW - MASS MARKET; 1st edition (1 February 2005)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 256 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0099478285
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0099478287
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 14.61 x 0.64 x 20.32 cm
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.3 out of 5 stars 1,446

About the author

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Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf

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Virginia Woolf is now recognized as a major twentieth-century author, a great novelist and essayist and a key figure in literary history as a feminist and a modernist. Born in 1882, she was the daughter of the editor and critic Leslie Stephen, and suffered a traumatic adolescence after the deaths of her mother, in 1895, and her step-sister Stella, in 1897, leaving her subject to breakdowns for the rest of her life. Her father died in 1904 and two years later her favourite brother Thoby died suddenly of typhoid.

With her sister, the painter Vanessa Bell, she was drawn into the company of writers and artists such as Lytton Strachey and Roger Fry, later known as the Bloomsbury Group. Among them she met Leonard Woolf, whom she married in 1912, and together they founded the Hogarth Press in 1917, which was to publish the work of T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster and Katherine Mansfield as well as the earliest translations of Freud. Woolf lived an energetic life among friends and family, reviewing and writing, and dividing her time between London and the Sussex Downs. In 1941, fearing another attack of mental illness, she drowned herself.

Her first novel, The Voyage Out, appeared in 1915, and she then worked through the transitional Night and Day (1919) to the highly experimental and impressionistic Jacob's Room (1922). From then on her fiction became a series of brilliant and extraordinarily varied experiments, each one searching for a fresh way of presenting the relationship between individual lives and the forces of society and history. She was particularly concerned with women's experience, not only in her novels but also in her essays and her two books of feminist polemic, A Room of One's Own (1929) and Three Guineas (1938).

Her major novels include Mrs Dalloway (1925), the historical fantasy Orlando (1928), written for Vita Sackville-West, the extraordinarily poetic vision of The Waves (1931), the family saga of The Years (1937), and Between the Acts (1941). All these are published by Penguin, as are her Diaries, Volumes I-V, and selections from her essays and short stories.

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Top reviews from Australia

Marie Ritchie
5.0 out of 5 stars A classic from the past. Amazing imagination and relevant in 2017!
Reviewed in Australia on 6 June 2017
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What a hoot. Really enjoyed the fantasy. Very different and entertaining
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E. A. Solinas
5.0 out of 5 stars I shall dream wild dreams
Reviewed in Australia on 12 January 2015
No lover in the world ever wrote a valentine more exquisite than Virginia Woolf's tribute to her lover Vita Sackville-West.

That tribute was "Orlando: A Biography," a magical-realism tale about a perpetually youthful, charming hero/ine who traverses three centuries and both genders -- and Woolf's writing reaches a new peak as she explores the hauntingly sensuous world of Orlando. It's one of those rare novels that transcends the time in which it was written, even as its hero/ine transcends gender.

Orlando was born a young aristocratic man in the time of Queen Elizabeth I. When the dying monarch visited his home, the charming young lord became her new court favorite (and briefly lover). His passionate, curious personality attracted many other women over the years -- until he fell in love with Sasha, a mercurial but faithless Russian princess (supposedly based on Sackville-West's ex-girlfriend Violet Trefusis). Bereft of true love, he devoted himself to poetry and entertainment.

But then he's assigned to be an ambassador to Constantinople, and something strange and inexplicable happens. While a bloody revolution rages all around Orlando, he sleeps for a full week... and wakes newly metamorphosed into a woman, who cannot be expected to fight. With the same mind and soul but a female body, Orlando sets out on a new life -- and discovers that women aren't quite as different from men as she once thought.

"Orlando: A Biography" is a very weird book, and was even more so when it was written since "magical realism" didn't exist as a literary style in 1928. Virginia Woolf makes no explanations about Orlando's immortality or unexpected gender switch. It's simply accepted that once he was a man, and then she became a woman, and that s/he has lived from the Elizabethan era until at least the 1920s (and who knows, maybe Orlando still wanders among us?). That mystery, ironically, saves it from seeming trite -- it's just a mystery of the inexplicable universe.

And Woolf's writing is at its peak here. Her prose is soaked in luxurious descriptions that constantly tease the senses -- silver and gold, frozen flowers, crystalline ice, starlight and the exquisite expanses of nature's beauty. At times the sensual writing seems almost feverish, and Woolf adds an almost mythic quality by inserting spirits of feminine virtues (Modesty, Purity and Chastity appear to try to hide Orlando's feminine body), and by having her hero/ine encounter great poets, queens and men of the sea.

And Orlando him/herself is a truly fascinating character -- s/he can be sweet, passionate, romantic, wild and melancholy, and s/he has an almost magnetic charisma. He starts off the story as an elusive romantic teenager, suffers a heartbreak that matures him as an artist, and post-metamorphosis she becomes a woman of the modern world. Both in mind and body, Orlando is a very different woman at the end than the boy s/he began as.

"Orlando: A Biography" is a truly spellbinding book -- Virginia Woolf's prose enthralls the senses while her main character explores the boundaries of gender. A must-read, for everyone.
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Belinda
2.0 out of 5 stars Too self-congratulatory for me!
Reviewed in Australia on 19 October 2015
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Not my favourite Woolf by any stretch of the imagination. I felt it to be too self-congratulatory and had some questionable issues to do with race. Though she is doing clever things with time and character, and the section when Orlando changes gender is phenomenal, there was just too much about this book that I couldn't enjoy. Easily my least favourite Woolf thus far... and this is coming from a Woolf scholar!
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emmanuel varsos
5.0 out of 5 stars excellent
Reviewed in Canada on 7 March 2022
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condition: AAA
speed of delivery: AAA
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MH
5.0 out of 5 stars Livre
Reviewed in France on 14 April 2024
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Parfait
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Otto
5.0 out of 5 stars Bel romanzo!
Reviewed in Italy on 14 November 2021
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Il romanzo è arrivato in buone condizioni. Il libro racconta di un uomo che si ritrova all'improvviso ad essere trasformato in donna in diverse epoche storiche . Esso è dedicato alla poetessa Vita Sackville-West, con la quale l'autrice ebbe una relazione. Un romanzo sicuramente interessante considerato il fatto che risale al 1928. Consigliato a tutti gli amanti dei classici!
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Otto
5.0 out of 5 stars Bel romanzo!
Reviewed in Italy on 14 November 2021
Il romanzo è arrivato in buone condizioni. Il libro racconta di un uomo che si ritrova all'improvviso ad essere trasformato in donna in diverse epoche storiche . Esso è dedicato alla poetessa Vita Sackville-West, con la quale l'autrice ebbe una relazione. Un romanzo sicuramente interessante considerato il fatto che risale al 1928. Consigliato a tutti gli amanti dei classici!
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Robert
3.0 out of 5 stars It's fine
Reviewed in Mexico on 16 August 2020
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It took me far too long to finish it (around a year and a half, something that rarely happens)
It's not a bad book and I love the idea behind it but unfortunately it's not my kind of book
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Harshit
5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant
Reviewed in India on 10 August 2021
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Needless to say, the text is amazing. The edition is very comfortable to hold, sturdy, and the page quality is pretty good and annotation friendly.
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Harshit
5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant
Reviewed in India on 10 August 2021
Needless to say, the text is amazing. The edition is very comfortable to hold, sturdy, and the page quality is pretty good and annotation friendly.
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3 people found this helpful
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