description: 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 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.
language: English
title: Orlando
titlecomplete: Orlando
characters: Orlando, Nicholas Greene, Sasha, Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine
genres: Fiction, Classics, Historical, Queer, Historical Fiction, Feminism, Fantasy, Literature, Novels, LGBT
ratings_count: 86876
places: United Kingdom, England
publisher: Signet Classics