Orlando (Vintage Classics) - Softcover

Woolf, Virginia

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0099478285 ISBN 13: 9780099478287

Publisher: Vintage Classics, 2008

Synopsis

Orlando’s journey, from the court of Queen Elizabeth I to modern times will also be an internal one. He is an impulsive poet who learns patience in matters of the heart, and a woman who knows what it is to be a man. Virginia’s Woolf’s most unusual and fantastic creation is a funny, exuberant tale which examines the very nature of sexuality.

About this title

Review:

In 1928, way before everyone else was talking about gender-bending and way, way before the terrific movie with Tilda Swinton, Virginia Woolf wrote her comic masterpiece, a fantastic, fanciful love letter disguised as a biography, to Vita Sackville-West. Orlando enters the book as an Elizabethan nobleman and leaves the book three centuries and one change of gender later as a liberated woman of the 1920s. Along the way this most rambunctious of Woolf's characters engages in sword fights, trades barbs with 18th century wits, has a baby, and drives a car. This is a deliriously written, breathless-making book and a classic both of lesbian literature and the Western canon.

From the Inside Flap:

Introduction by Quentin Bell

Originally conceived by Virginia Woolf as a playful tribute to Vita Sackville-West, the central character lives as both a man and a woman through four centuries. This definitive edition contains the original Hogarth Press text as overseen by the author, the illustrations which appeared in the first edition in 1928 and a list of textual variants that appeared during her lifetime.

About this edition

• Publisher: Vintage Classics
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 0099478285
• ISBN 13: 9780099478287
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 256