Orlando (Orlando: A Biography) - Softcover

Potter, Sally

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0571172954 ISBN 13: 9780571172955

Publisher: Faber & Faber, 1994

Synopsis

Orlando is Sally Potter's bold, unsentimental re-working of Virginia Woolf's classic novel in which an innocent aristocrat journeys through 400 years of English history - first as a man, then as a woman.

The film has won more than twenty international awards and enjoyed considerable box-office success around the world.

Addressing contemporary concerns about gender and identity, the screenplay is remarkably true to the spirit of Virginia Woolf. But it also skilfully adapts the original story to give it a striking, cinematic form. How Sally Potter has achieved this is described in the book's Introduction, which outlines the process by which Woolf's novel has been transformed into Potter's film.

About this title

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.

Synopsis:

"Orlando", the film, has won more than 20 international awards. While addressing contemporary concerns about gender and identity, the screenplay adapts the original story to give it a striking cinematic form.

About this edition

• Publisher: Faber & Faber
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 0571172954
• ISBN 13: 9780571172955
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 96