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Virginia Woolf's most unusual creation, Orlando is a fantastical biography as well as a funny, exuberant romp through history that examines the true nature of sexuality.
As a teenage boy, the handsome Orlando serves as a page at the Elizabethan court and becomes the favourite of the elderly queen. After Elizabeth's death, he falls deeply in love with Sasha, an elusive and somewhat feral princess in the entourage of the Russian embassy.
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. At the midpoint of the novel, Orlando, now an ambassador in Constantinople, awakes to find that he is now a woman.
The book describes the adventures of a poet who changes sex from man to woman and lives for centuries, meeting the key figures of English literary history. Considered a feminist classic, the book has been written about extensively by scholars of women's writing and gender and transgender studies.
A propos de l'auteur
Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) was a Modernist writer, widely considered to be one of the most important of the twentieth century. She and her husband Leonard bought a hand-printing press in 1917, and they set up Hogarth Press in their house in Richmond, which published much of Virginia's work, as well as those of friends and fellow luminaries. She was a member of the Bloomsbury Set - an artistic, philosophic and literary group which included John Maynard Keynes, E.M. Forster and Lytton Strachey. Today she is best remembered for her novels - in particular To the Lighthouse and Mrs Dalloway - and her essay A Room of One's Own.
