Orlando - Softcover

Woolf, Virginia

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0199536597 ISBN 13: 9780199536597

Publisher: Oxford University Press España, S.A., 2008

Synopsis

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.

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: Oxford University Press España, S.A.
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 0199536597
• ISBN 13: 9780199536597
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 416