Orlando

Virginia Woolf's playful mock 'biography' of a chameleonic historical figure, written for her intimate friend Vita Sackville-West

'A fantasy, impossible but delicious ... an exuberance of life and wit' The Times Literary Supplement

First masculine, then feminine, Orlando begins life as a young sixteenth-century nobleman, then gallops through the centuries to end up as a woman writer in Virginia Woolf's own time. Written for the charismatic, bisexual writer Vita Sackville-West, this playful mock biography of a chameleon-like historical figure is both a wry commentary on gender and, in Woolf's own words, a 'writer's holiday' which delights in its ambiguity and capriciousness.

Edited by Brenda Lyons with an Introduction and Notes by Sandra M. Gilbert