Orlando, A Biography

What It's About

Orlando begins as a young nobleman at the court of Elizabeth I and, over the following three centuries, barely ages — living through the reigns of successive monarchs, the fashions and literary movements of each era, and, partway through, waking up transformed into a woman. Framed as a mock-biography, complete with a fictional narrator and biographer's asides, the novel follows Orlando's shifting identity, loves and ambitions as a poet across this impossibly long life, up to the book's present day of 1928.

Key Concepts

The novel is best known for its treatment of gender as fluid rather than fixed — Orlando's change of sex is presented almost incidentally, with society's response to it explored more than the change itself. It also plays with the nature of time, compressing centuries into a single lifetime, and satirises the conventions of biography and the sweep of English literary history, with Orlando's long life used as a device to survey changing literary tastes from the Elizabethans to the modernists.

About the Author

Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) was an English writer and one of the most significant modernist authors of the twentieth century. Born into a literary household in London, she became a central figure of the Bloomsbury Group, a circle of writers, artists and intellectuals who shaped early twentieth-century British culture. She died in 1941.