Orlando

Description

A playful mock 'biography' of a chameleonic historical figure, written for Virginia Woolf's intimate friend Vita Sackville-West. Orlando has always been an outsider . . . His longing for passion, adventure and fulfilment takes him out of his own time. Chasing a dream through the centuries, he bounds from Elizabethan England amd imperial Turkey to the modern world. Will he find happiness with the exotic Russian Princess Sasha? Or is the dashing explorer Shelmerdine the ideal man? And what form will Orlando take on the journey - a nobleman, traveller, writer? Man or . . . woman?

Virginia Woolf, born in 1882, was the major novelist at the heart of the inter-war Bloomsbury Group. Her early novels include The Voyage Out, Night and Day and Jacob's Room. Between 1925 and 1931 she produced her finest masterpieces, including Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Orlando and the experimental The Waves. Her later novels include The Years and Between the Acts, and she also maintained an astonishing output of literary criticism, journalism and biography, including the passionate feminist essay A Room of One's Own. Suffering from depression, she drowned herself in the River Ouse in 1941.

'I read this book and believed it was a hallucinogenic, interactive biography of my own life and future' -- Tilda Swinton A book that refuses all constraints: historical, fantastical, metaphysical, sociological -- Jeanette Winterson * New Statesman * A fantasy, impossible but delicious ... an exuberance of life and wit * The Times Literary Supplement *