Orlando

Virginia Woolf's pioneering novel about a time-traveling sixteenth-century nobleman who wakes up in the body of a woman, with a new foreword by Andrea Lawlor, author of Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl

"A brilliant book that teaches you so much about identity and love-all these fundamental questions that we ask ourselves." -Emma Corrin

"I read this book and believed it was a hallucinogenic, interactive biography of my own life and future." -Tilda Swinton

A Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition, with flaps and deckle-edged paper

Virginia Woolf's pioneering novelabout a time-traveling sixteenth-century nobleman who wakes up in the body of a woman, with a new foreword by Andrea Lawlor, author of Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl

"A brilliant book that teaches you so much about identity and love-all these fundamental questions that we ask ourselves." -Emma Corrin

"I read this book and believed it was a hallucinogenic, interactive biography of my own life and future." -Tilda Swinton

A Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition,with flaps and deckle-edged paper

First masculine, then feminine, Orlando is a young sixteenth-century nobleman who gallops through the centuries, from Elizabethan England and imperial Turkey to Virginia Woolf's own time. Will he find happiness with the exotic Russian Princess Sasha? Or is the dashing explorer Shelmerdine the ideal man? And what form will Orlando take on the journey-a nobleman, traveler, writer? Man or . . . woman?

Written for the charismatic, bisexual writer Vita Sackville-West, Orlando is one of Woolf's most popular and accessible novels, a playful mock biography of a chameleon-like historical figure that is both a wry commentary on gender and, in Woolf's own words, a "writer's holiday" that delights in its ambiguity and capriciousness.

This edition is collated from all known proofs, manuscripts, and impressions to reflect the author's intentions, and includes an introduction and notes by the distinguished scholar and coauthor of The Madwoman in the Attic Sandra M. Gibert.

For more than seventy-five years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 2,000 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

About the Authors

Virginia Woolf, born in 1882, was the major novelist at the heart of the inter-war Bloomsbury Group. Her early novels include The Voyage Out, Night and Day and Jacob's Room. Between 1925 and 1931 she produced her finest masterpieces, including Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Orlando and the experimental The Waves. Her later novels include The Years and Between the Acts, and she also maintained an astonishing output of literary criticism, journalism and biography, including the passionate feminist essay A Room of One's Own. Suffering from depression, she drowned herself in the River Ouse in 1941.

Andrea Lawlor is the author of Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl: a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Fiction. The winner of a Whiting Award, they teach writing at Mount Holyoke College.