Virginia Woolf's Orlando is your typical Elizabethan man: a favorite of the Queen, madly in love with a Russian princess, fleeing an Archduchess and waking up one fine day in Constantinople to find he has become, of all things, a woman. She survives the 19th and 20th centuries grappling with what it means to live fully in the present, in our own skin, in our own gender and in our own time.
What Is the Story of Orlando?
Orlando is a fanciful tale of a young man who lives for three centuries—from Elizabethan times, when he has a romantic relationship with the aging queen, to the early 20th century, when he has morphed into a woman after a period of deep sleep. (Virginia Woolf published the novel in 1928 as an homage to her great love Vita Sackville-West.) Along the way, Orlando falls deeply in love with a Russian princess, becomes the British ambassador to Constantinople, marries a sea captain and becomes an award-winning poet.
