The beautiful Everyman gift edition in hardback.The Lord Orlando's country seat has 365 rooms. An exquisitely beautiful youth,he is a favourite of the ageing Queen Elizabeth and enjoys all that Court and tavern have to offer. He falls passionately in love with the intriguing Sasha,an androgynous Russian princess,who jilts him. Stricken,he takes up Literature,penning huge quantities of poems and plays,'all romantic,and all long'. A few decades later a still youthful Orlando is appointed ambassador to Constantinople by Charles II. Here he wakes up one day and finds he has the body of a woman. "Different sex,same person",she observes,unphased.In London,it is the eighteenth century,and she can hobnob with "men of genius" Pope and Swift,Johnson and Boswell. She has affairs with both women and men,but before long it is the nineteenth century,oppressively gloomy and moral and probably time to find a husband. Fortunately,in a Brontsque moment on a moor,the gender- nonconforming Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine,newly back from Cape Horn,gallops past and scoops her up into bliss.Woolf's most unusual and joyous novel was inspired by her affair with the dashing author and aristocrat,Vita Sackville West.
Publisher: EverymanISBN: 9781841594149Number of pages: 248Weight: 380 gDimensions: 206 x 132 x 20 mm
MEDIA REVIEWS
Orlando has sometimes been dismissed as a romp. As a less important book than Mrs Dalloway or To the Lighthouse. This is to misread it. It was far ahead of its time in terms of gender politics and gender progress
Virginia Woolf
A titan of twentieth-century literature,a feminist icon and a figurehead of the modernist movement in Britain,Virginia Woolf remains one of the most daringly experimental writers in print. Her works include Mrs Dalloway,To the Lighthouse and Orlando and the pioneering non-fiction collection A Room of One's Own.
Visit the Virginia Woolf author page
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