Orlando: A Biography

ix, 333 pp. Blue cloth, blind-stamped double rule and publisher's emblem on front board, gilt titles. Frontispiece portrait of Orlando, photographic plates in text. The novel which inspired the 1992 film starring Tilda Swinton and Quentin Crisp, by the feminist author and publisher known for Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, A Room of One's Own, etc. She and her husband Leonard founded The Hogarth Press, and they were both members of The Bloomsbury Group, a literary society composed of numerous important intellectuals and writers of the time. "Orlando: a Biography (1928) celebrates [Woolf's lover] Vita [Sackville-West] as a man-woman, switching gender to endorse the androgynous creative mind through the ages." - Oxford Dictionary of National Biography "Virginia Woolf's Orlando 'The longest and most charming love letter in literature', playfully constructs the figure of Orlando as the fictional embodiment of Woolf's close friend and lover, Vita Sackville-West. Spanning three centuries, the novel opens as Orlando, a young nobleman in Elizabeth's England, awaits a visit from the Queen and traces his experience with first love as England under James I lies locked in the embrace of the Great Frost. At the midpoint of the novel, Orlando, now an ambassador in Constantinople, awakes to find that he is now a woman, and the novel indulges in farce and irony to consider the roles of women in the 18th and 19th centuries. As the novel ends in 1928, a year consonant with full suffrage for women. Orlando, now a wife and mother, stands poised at the brink of a future that holds new hope and promise for women."