Born a nobleman in Elizabethan England, Orlando lives for over three hundred years, wakes up one morning transformed into a woman, and carries on — through the frost fairs of the seventeenth century, the drawing rooms of the eighteenth, and into Virginia Woolf's own 1928 present — barely aging a day. Framed as a mock-biography, Woolf's most playful and dazzling novel is at once a love letter to her friend Vita Sackville-West, a sly history of English literature, and one of the earliest and boldest explorations of gender as performance rather than destiny. Nearly a century later, Orlando still reads like nothing else in the language.
