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Orlando: A Biography Paperback – Illustrated, October 24, 1973
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As his tale begins, Orlando is a passionate sixteen-year-old nobleman whose days are spent in rowdy revelry, filled with the colorful delights of Queen Elizabeth I’s court. By the close, three centuries have passed, and he will have transformed into a thirty-six-year-old woman in the year 1928. Orlando’s journey is also an internal one—he is an impulsive poet who learns patience in matter of the heart, and a woman who knows what it is to be a man.
Virginia Woolf’s most unusual creation, Orlando is a fantastical biography as well as a funny, exuberant romp through history that examines the true nature of sexuality.
- Print length352 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherMariner Books
- Publication dateOctober 24, 1973
- Reading age14 years and up
- Dimensions5.5 x 1 x 8 inches
- ISBN-10015670160X
- ISBN-13978-0156701600
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Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
Review
"As a work of political satire and feminist fantasy, Orlando laid the groundwork for today’s cultural landscape, in which the boundaries of both gender and literary genre are more porous than ever . . . If published today, Orlando might have been misshelved not as biography but as fantasy or science fiction — genres in which women writers in recent years have increasingly found the space to challenge the straight-white-male strictures of both realist fiction and reality itself. Orlando’s blend of social critique and bold fantasy echoes in the postwar fiction of Ursula Le Guin and Angela Carter, and more recently in the fairy-tale retellings of Helen Oyeyemi and Daniel Mallory Ortberg — as well as in novels like Melissa Broder’s The Pisces." —Vulture, "Orlando is the Virginia Woolf Novel We Need Right Now" —
About the Author
Product details
- Publisher : Mariner Books; First Edition (October 24, 1973)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 352 pages
- ISBN-10 : 015670160X
- ISBN-13 : 978-0156701600
- Reading age : 14 years and up
- Item Weight : 13.6 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.5 x 1 x 8 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #53,249 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #298 in Biographical Fiction (Books)
- #1,751 in Classic Literature & Fiction
- #4,373 in Literary Fiction (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
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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Top reviews from the United States
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This is an odd, interesting story. It was fascinating when Orlando starts to see all the ways it is different to be a man and a woman in his (her) culture. How, really, the primary purpose of women, is to live for men. There are some interesting takes, too, on transgender. (And not just with the main character.)
I thought the fantasy of the story was interesting, especially for the time it was written. Woolf is an intriguing writer. Though I did think the story a bit slow at times.
I like that the author quite obviously adores the main character, somehow that makes it very personal and lovely to read, but at the same time her portrayal of that character seems quite flat - nothing truly bad or negative happens or is described - yet somehow Orlando seems to grow as a character without much in the way of struggles. I like the way the author plays with time and gender and social norms quite a bit. The florid, romantic, stream-of-consciousness writing style did get horribly old in places, but just when I was ready to put the book down, she'd make fun of herself for writing that way. So much so, the author was almost her own character in the book, which I quite liked. But at the same time, a lot of the book I just didn't get anything from, because of the style maybe (I read and understood the words but they held no meaning on any level for me). I went back and reread a couple sections to make sure I wasn't just sleepy or distracted, and sometimes that was the case, but usually there just wasn't anything in that section for me. Maybe those were the more personal portions of the love-letter that, since I wasn't Woolf or her GF, I couldn't understand.
I'm glad I read it, I've already recommended it to others (with the caveats above), but I might have to read more Woolf to sort out better how I feel about this book.
Top reviews from other countries
speed of delivery: AAA
Reviewed in Italy on November 14, 2021
It's not a bad book and I love the idea behind it but unfortunately it's not my kind of book
Reviewed in India on August 10, 2021