'I feel the need of an escapade after these serious poetic experimental books...I want to kick up my heels & be off.'

Orlando tells the tale of an extraordinary individual who lives through centuries of English history, first as a man, then as a woman; of his/her encounters with queens, kings, novelists, playwrights, and poets, and of his/her struggle to find fame and immortality not through actions, but through the written word. At its heart are the life and works of Woolf's friend and lover, Vita Sackville-West, and Knole, the historic home of the Sackvilles. But as well as being a love letter to Vita, Orlando mocks the conventions of biography and history, teases the pretensions of contemporary men of letters, and wryly examines sexual double standards.

This new edition discusses Woolf's stylistic aims, the biographical parallels, and the work's literary context, and includes the original illustrations.

Virginia Woolf

Michael H. Whitworth is the author of Virginia Woolf in the OWC Authors in Context series (2005), and Reading Modernist Poetry (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010). He has contributed to the Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf (2000, 2/e 2010) and he is the editor of NIght and Day in the Cambridge Edition of Virginia Woolf (forthcoming).