Virginia Woolf

Penguin Modern Classics: Orlando Virginia Woolf

Once described as the ´longest and most charming love-letter in literature´, the Virginia Woolf's Orlando is edited by Brenda Lyons with an introduction and notes by Sandra M. Gilbert in ´Penguin Classics´.

Written for Virginia Woolf's intimate friend, the charismatic writer Vita Sackville-West, Orlando is a playful mock ´biography´ of a chameleonic historical figure, immortal and ageless, who changes sex and identity on a whim. First masculine, then feminine, Orlando begins life as a young sixteenth-century nobleman, then gallops through three centuries to end up as a woman writer in Virginia Woolf´s own time. A wry commentary on gender roles and modes of history, Orlando is also, in Woolf´s own words, a light-hearted ´writer´s Holiday´ which delights in ambiguity and capriciousness.