Orlando - Introduction by Jeanette Winterson

Informationen zum Autor VIRGINIA WOOLF (1882-1941) was born in London. A pioneer in the narrative use of stream of consciousness, she published her first novel, The Voyage Out, in 1915. This was followed by literary criticism and essays, most notably A Room of One’s Own, and other acclaimed novels, including Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and Orlando. About the Introducer: JEANETTE WINTERSON is an English writer and the author of many novels, including Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit and Sexing the Cherry. She is a professor of creative writing at the University of Manchester, and has won a Whitbread Prize, a BAFTA Award for Best Drama, the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, the E. M. Forster Award, and two Lambda Literary Awards. She is a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Klappentext "Woolf's most lighthearted novel is a playful and exuberant romp through history. As a teenage nobleman, Orlando spends his days in revelry at the colorful Tudor court of Queen Elizabeth and his nights in writing earnest poetry. A favorite of the elderly queen, he falls in love with and is jilted by a wayward Russian princess. Two kings later, having reached his thirties, Orlando is sent to serve as ambassador to Constantinople, where he awakens one day to find himself in the body of a woman. The Lady Orlando takes this circumstance in stride and returns to England, where she engages in love affairs with both men and women, consorts with the famous poets of each age, finds happiness with an unconventional husband, and at last achieves publication of her own epic poem in the year 1928, the same year that Woolf published her novel. With its blend of fantastical adventure and satirical wit, Orlando was an immediate popular and critical success, one whose status as a classic has only grown with time."-- Provided by publisher. Leseprobe from the Introduction by Jeanette Winterson “Yesterday morning I was in despair... I couldn’t screw a word from me; and at last dropped my head in my hands: dipped my pen in the ink, and wrote these words, as if automatically, on a clean sheet: Orlando: a Biography . . . [I]t sprung upon me how I could revolutionise biography in a night...”  —Virginia Woolf to Vita Sackville-West, 9 October 1927 It was playful and bold to write a novel as though it were a biography, and to call a fiction a life, and to invent that life around a woman the author was in love with, and to stretch her over 400 years, like a body freed from the problems of gravity. In Orlando (1928), Virginia Woolf did away with the usual co-ordinates of biography and set off through time as though it were an element, not a dimension. The story is simple: Orlando is a young nobleman, aged 16, in the reign of Elizabeth I. After a series of adventures and disappointments in love and life and poetry, he takes an appointment as the British ambassador in Constantinople. Aged 30, he wakes up one morning from a week-long dead sleep to find that he is now a woman. Orlando returns to England and discovers that it changes as centuries pass but he, or rather she, continues as before. Woolf wrote the book at top speed, scarcely pausing, as Orlando scarcely pauses as he races through 400 years. On 11 October 1928 – the last day in the novel – Orlando has reached the age of 36: “The true length of a person’s life, whatever the Dictionary of National Biography may say, is always a matter of dispute.” This is a poke at Woolf’s father, Sir Leslie Stephen, the great and erudite editor of the DNB. The Victorians loved dates and facts, especially dates and facts in order – theirs was the age of classification, of tax – onomy, of the museum, the geographical society, the butterfly net. The pinned wings or the shot and stuffed head are symbols of Victorian England. The Dictionary of Nation...

About the author

VIRGINIA WOOLF (1882–1941) was born in London. A pioneer in the narrative use of stream of consciousness, she published her first novel, The Voyage Out, in 1915. This was followed by literary criticism and essays, most notably A Room of One’s Own, and other acclaimed novels, including Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and Orlando.

About the Introducer: JEANETTE WINTERSON is an English writer and the author of many novels, including Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit and Sexing the Cherry. She is a professor of creative writing at the University of Manchester, and has won a Whitbread Prize, a BAFTA Award for Best Drama, the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, the E. M. Forster Award, and two Lambda Literary Awards. She is a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Product details

• Authors: Jeanette Winterson, Virginia Woolf
• Publisher: Everyman s Library PRH USA
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 02.01.2024
• EAN: 9781101908327
• ISBN: 978-1-101-90832-7
• No. of pages: 248
• Dimensions: 133 mm x 212 mm x 22 mm
• Series: Everyman's Library Contemporary Classics Series
• Subject: Fiction > Narrative literature