Orlando (Wordsworth Classics) - Softcover

Woolf, Virginia

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1853262390 ISBN 13: 9781853262395

Publisher: Wordsworth Editions, 1995

Synopsis

Virginia 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.

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: Wordsworth Editions
• Publication date: 1995
• ISBN 10: 1853262390
• ISBN 13: 9781853262395
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 166
• Editor: Pawlowski Professor And Chair Merry M, Carabine Dr Keith