Orlando

Orlando is a novel by Virginia Woolf, published in 1928. Modeled on her close friend, the poet Vita Sackville-West, it takes the form of a "biography" of a fictional figure. The story begins in the Elizabethan age of the sixteenth century and runs to the "present" in which Woolf laid down her pen, 1928, spanning nearly four hundred years. The protagonist, Orlando, is at first a beautiful and innocent noble youth who enters the court after catching Queen Elizabeth's favor. He then lives through the Great Frost, a love affair with a Russian princess and its painful end, and a reclusive life at a country estate, where he becomes absorbed in poetry and moves among literary circles. Later he is sent as an ambassador to Turkey, and after a great fire and a long sleep in Constantinople he becomes a woman. The awakened Orlando first lives among the Gypsies, then returns to England, where as a grande dame she moves through high society and befriends men of letters such as Pope and Addison. In the Victorian age, in order to keep writing, she must compromise with the "spirit of the age" and marries a sea captain. By the end she is an award-winning poet of the twentieth century, returning to the great house and the great oak that run through the whole book, and looking back on her long pursuit of poetry and literature. Told in a light, witty style, the book uses its protagonist, who crosses time and gender, to discuss gender discipline, identity, and creative freedom, and is one of Woolf's more accessible works.