Orlando

Virginia Woolf's 1928 novel Orlando is her most entertaining and exciting book. The mock biography recounts the life of a sixteenth-century nobleman who ends up as a woman writer in 1920s England. Over the centuries Orlando lives through the gamut of human experience as both a man and a woman. It is an irreverent send-up of dutifully rendered biographies of great men, a tongue-in-cheek commentary on some formal innovations in Woolf's novels, and a carefully masked portrait of Vita Sackville-West, the real-life aristocrat who swept into Woolf's life and heart. Woolf's exuberance in realizing that a faux biography afforded her an entirely new inventive freedom animates this frolicsome gallop across four centuries.