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Orlando

By Virginia Woolf
Series: Everyman’s Library Contemporary Classics
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Book Hero Magic crafted this summary to help describe this book. While it's new and still learning, it may not be perfect - your feedback is welcome! Summary
Orlando by Virginia Woolf is a captivating novel about an English nobleman who embarks on a remarkable journey through time, spanning several centuries. During this journey, Orlando undergoes a mysterious transformation, shifting gender, which offers a profound exploration of identity, gender fluidity, and the societal changes over time. This novel interweaves historical and imaginative elements, providing a rich, satirical commentary on English society and literature.
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Format: Hardback
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Book Hero Magic created this recommendation. While it's new and still learning, it may not be perfect - your feedback is welcome! IS THIS YOUR NEXT READ?

You might enjoy this book if you're intrigued by a unique blend of biography, history, and fantasy that explores themes of identity, gender, and time. This intriguing narrative follows an extraordinary protagonist who experiences life over several centuries, offering a satirical yet insightful perspective on social norms and human nature. Its imaginative storytelling and Woolf's distinct prose may captivate those who appreciate literary innovation and philosophical depth.

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Orlando

Book Hero Magic formatted this description to make it easier to read. While it's new and still learning, it may not be perfect - your feedback is welcome! Description

In the court of Queen Elizabeth I, the young nobleman Orlando begins his search for identity as he embarks on one of the greatest adventures in all of literature. An Everyman Classics hardback edition of Virginia Woolf's fantastical novel about a young Elizabethan nobleman whose life spans four centuries – and who transitions into a woman. History, fun, and gender politics – who better to introduce than Jeanette Winterson.

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 Brontesque 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.

Series: Everyman’s Library Contemporary Classics

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Book Hero Magic summarised reviews for this book. While it's new and still learning, it may not be perfect - your feedback is welcome! HOW HAS THIS BEEN REVIEWED?

Orlando is often underestimated compared to other works by Virginia Woolf, such as Mrs Dalloway or To the Lighthouse. However, it should be recognised for its innovative exploration of gender politics and progressive themes, which were remarkably ahead of its time. Jeanette Winterson emphasises the importance of this aspect in her appraisal of the book.

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Book Details

INFORMATION

ISBN: 9781841594149

Publisher: Everyman

Format: Hardback

Date Published: 23 November 2023

Country: United Kingdom

Imprint: Everyman's Library

Contributors:

  • Introduction by Jeanette Winterson

Audience: General / adult

DIMENSIONS

Spine width: 10.0mm

Width: 122.0mm

Height: 200.0mm

Weight: 360g

Pages: 248

Collections

Fiction General Fiction Historical Fiction Literary Fiction Penguin Books Series: Everyman’s Library Contemporary Classics Virginia Woolf

About the Author

Date- 2004-06-24 Virginia Woolf was born in London in 1882. After her father's death in 1904 Virginia and her sister, the painter Vanessa Bell, moved to Bloomsbury and became the centre of 'The Bloomsbury Group'. This informal collective of artists and writers exerted a powerful influence over early twentieth-century British culture. In 1912 Virginia married Leonard Woolf, a writer and social reformer. Three years later, her first novel The Voyage Out was published, followed by Night and Day (1919) and Jacob's Room (1922). Between 1925 and 1931 Virginia Woolf produced what are now regarded as her finest masterpieces, from Mrs Dalloway (1925) to The Waves (1931). She also maintained an astonishing output of literary criticism, short fiction, journalism and biography. On 28 March 1941, a few months before the publication of her final novel, Between the Acts, Virginia Woolf committed suicide. Virginia Woolf is now recognized as a major twentieth-century author, a great novelist and essayist and a key figure in literary history as a feminist and a modernist. Born in 1882, she was the daughter of the editor and critic Leslie Stephen, and suffered a traumatic adolescence after the deaths of her mother, in 1895, and her step-sister Stella, in 1897, leaving her subject to breakdowns for the rest of her life. Her father died in 1904 and two years later her favourite brother Thoby died suddenly of typhoid. With her sister, the painter Vanessa Bell, she was drawn into the company of writers and artists such as Lytton Strachey and Roger Fry, later known as the Bloomsbury Group. Among them she met Leonard Woolf, whom she married in 1912, and together they founded the Hogarth Press in 1917, which was to publish the work of T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster and Katherine Mansfield as well as the earliest translations of Freud. Woolf lived an energetic life among friends and family, reviewing and writing, and dividing her time between London and the Sussex Downs. In 1941, fearing another attack of mental illness, she drowned herself. Her first novel, The Voyage Out, appeared in 1915, and she then worked through the transitional Night and Day (1919) to the highly experimental and impressionistic Jacob's Room (1922). From then on her fiction became a series of brilliant and extraordinarily varied experiments, each one searching for a fresh way of presenting the relationship between individual lives and the forces of society and history. She was particularly concerned with women's experience, not only in her novels but also in her essays and her two books of feminist polemic, A Room of One's Own (1929) and Three Guineas (1938). Her major novels include Mrs Dalloway (1925), the historical fantasy Orlando (1928), written for Vita Sackville-West, the extraordinarily poetic vision of The Waves (1931), the family saga of The Years (1937), and Between the Acts (1941). All these are published by Penguin, as are her Diaries, Volumes I-V, and selections from her essays and short stories.

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