Orlando: a biography (Penguin classics)

Orlando: a biography (Penguin classics)

by Brenda Lyons (Editor), Brenda Lyons (Editor), Sandra Gilbert (Introduction), Virginia Woolf (Author)

Synopsis

Once described as the 'longest and most charming love-letter in literature', the Virginia Woolf's Orlando is edited by Brenda Lyons with an introduction and notes by Sandra M. Gilbert in Penguin Classics.

Written for Virginia Woolf's intimate friend, the charismatic writer Vita Sackville-West, Orlando is a playful mock 'biography' of a chameleonic historical figure, immortal and ageless, who changes sex and identity on a whim. First masculine, then feminine, Orlando begins life as a young sixteenth-century nobleman, then gallops through three centuries to end up as a woman writer in Virginia Woolf's own time. A wry commentary on gender roles and modes of history, Orlando is also, in Woolf's own words, a light-hearted 'writer's holiday' which delights in ambiguity and capriciousness.

$5.10

Quantity

2 in stock

More Information

Format: paperback
Publisher: Penguin Classics
Published:

ISBN 10: 0241371961
ISBN 13: 9780241371961

Media Reviews
'I read this book and believed it was a hallucinogenic, interactive biography of my own life and future' -- Tilda Swinton
A book that refuses all constraints: historical, fantastical, metaphysical, sociological -- Jeanette Winterson * New Statesman *
A fantasy, impossible but delicious ... an exuberance of life and wit * The Times Literary Supplement *
Author Bio
Virginia Woolf, born in 1882, was the major novelist at the heart of the inter-war Bloomsbury Group. Her early novels include The Voyage Out, Night and Day and Jacob's Room. Between 1925 and 1931 she produced her finest masterpieces, including Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Orlando and the experimental The Waves. Her later novels include The Years and Between the Acts, and she also maintained an astonishing output of literary criticism, journalism and biography, including the passionate feminist essay A Room of One's Own. Suffering from depression, she drowned herself in the River Ouse in 1941.