Orlando: A Biography

Swinton, Tilda; Woolf, Virginia

ISBN 10: 0140861637 ISBN 13: 9780140861631

Publisher: Penguin Classics, 1995

Synopsis

Moving in and out of three centuries and from one gender to the other, this is Virginia Woolf's tribute to Vita Sackville-West. By choosing his/her own sexual identy, Orlando is able to triumph over anatomy and chronology, and Woolf was able to tease out assumptions for biographical writing.

About this title

Review:

"This publisher′s critical editions of the major works of Virginia Woolf offer an important expansion of textual resources for Woolf readers and scholars. An essential addition to any Woolf collection."
Choice

From the Back Cover:

Orlando, subtitled A Biography, is one of Virginia Woolf′s most experimental works, a jeu d′esprit that becomes increasingly serious as it leads us on a satirical, and intensely poetic, progress through 300 years of English history. It is a book about the nature of writing, which not only plays with literary forms but subverts the fixed categories of time and sexuality. Its hero, who suddenly becomes a heroine, eludes death to live from the reign of Elizabeth I to the end of the 1920s.

While developing her hero–heroine against a richly colored historical backdrop in which many of the great names of English letters play cameo roles, Woolf explores various highly modern themes. The novel, first published in 1928, focuses particularly on the social and political position of women, on societal constructions of sexual identity, and the situation of the woman author. Based in part on the life and career of Vita Sackville–West, with whom Woolf was for a time in love, Orlando extends the boundaries of fiction and makes play with ideas of biographical authority. The novel presages techniques and interests developed in such later works as The Waves (1931) and Between the Acts (1941). Woolf′s feminist treatise, A Room of One′s Own, published the previous year, shares a number of the novel′s concerns.

This edition adopts as its copy–text the surviving proofs marked and revised by Woolf for the novel′s American publication. Purged of printing errors, the copy–text is emended by Woolf′s later revisions for the first English edition. The text is supplemented by an introduction setting the novel in its literary and biographical contexts, by explanatory notes offering much new information about its sources, and lists of emendations and textual variants.

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin Classics
• Publication date: 1995
• ISBN 10: 0140861637
• ISBN 13: 9780140861631
• Binding: Audio Cassette