Orlando - Hardcover

Woolf, Virginia

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1849026297 ISBN 13: 9781849026291

Publisher: Benediction Classics, 2010

Synopsis

Orlando is the extraordinary tale of a young man who finds wealth and favour in the court of Elizabeth I of England, but who never grows old. After experiencing love and adventure, a long sleep turns him into a woman, who in her turn faces discrimination and eventually love as the centuries unfold. This ground-breaking novel can be read in may ways: as an extended love-letter to Vita Sackville-West, as a meditation on the different treatment that men and women have experienced over the centuries and as an examination of the way literature itself has changed; 'Orlando' becomes the typical hero or heroine of every age.

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: Benediction Classics
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 1849026297
• ISBN 13: 9781849026291
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 242