Once described as the ´longest and most charming love-letter in literature´, the Virginia Woolf´s Orlando is edited by Brenda Lyons with an introduction and notes by Sandra M. Gilbert in Penguin Classics.
Written for Virginia Woolf´s intimate friend, the charismatic writer Vita Sackville-West, Orlando is a playful mock ´biography´ of a chameleonic historical figure, immortal and ageless, who changes sex and identity on a whim. First masculine, then feminine, Orlando begins life as a young sixteenth-century nobleman, then gallops through three centuries to end up as a woman writer in Virginia Woolf´s own time. A wry commentary on gender roles and modes of history, Orlando is also, in Woolf´s own words, a light-hearted ´writer´s holiday´ which delights in ambiguity and capriciousness.