Orlando

When we first meet the time-travelling, gender-shifting Orlando, he is a young aristocrat in the court of Queen Elizabeth I. An attractive and romantic youth, he is given to carousing and bouts of poetic excess. Later, while in Constantinople, Orlando suffers from a mysterious illness and awakens to find himself in the body of a woman. As Lady Orlando travels across countries and centuries, she falls in love again and again, though never averting her gaze from her chief desire: to be a published poet.

Dedicated to Virginia Woolf's close friend and lover Vita Sackville-West, Orlando is a playful yet profound novel that considers and challenges the social norms that governed the experiences of woman through time. It endures today as a feminist and queer classic and remains regarded as one of the most original novels of the 20th century.