Orlando: A Biography (Oxford World's Classics)
Virginia Woolf's exuberant 'biography' tells the story of the cross-dressing, sex-changing Orlando who begins life as a young noble in the sixteenth century and moves through numerous historical and geographical worlds to finish as a modern woman writer in the 1920s. The book is in part a happy...
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Virginia Woolf's exuberant 'biography' tells the story of the cross-dressing, sex-changing Orlando who begins life as a young noble in the sixteenth century and moves through numerous historical and geographical worlds to finish as a modern woman writer in the 1920s. The book is in part a happy tribute to the 'life' that her love for Vita Sackville-West had breathed into Virginia Woolf's own day-to-day existence; it is also Woolf's light-hearted and light-handed teasing out of the assumptions that lie behind the normal conventions for writing about a fictional or historical life. In this novel, Virginia Woolf plays loose and fast: Orlando uncovers a literary and sexual revolution overnight.
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Format: paperback
ISBN:
9780199536597 (0199536597)
Publish date: June 12th 2008
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Pages no: 345
Edition language: English
(Original Review, 2002-06-18)I’m probably in a minority, but I find Woolf hugely overrated. A snob in the way that Wilde was a snob before her, sucking up to the wealthy and titled and, like Wilde, happy to be unfaithful if it ingratiated her with the gentry. People go on about ‘a room of one’s own’...
Virginia Woolf cannot write badly but this book is entirely self indulgent and, despite some beautiful language, says very little of significance. In so far as it could be accused of having a plot, it does open up the possibility of interesting reflections, for example on the differences between me...
December 4, 2015This time I read the book aloud, my partner had never read any Virginia Woolf before and has the tendency to fall asleep when reading anything that doesn't relate to work. During the course of the novel I, of course, lost track of many sentences, lost breath after third semicolons an...
Are we so made that we have to take death in small doses daily or we could not go on with the business of living? And then what strange powers are these that penetrate our most secret ways and change our most treasured possessions without our willing it ? Had Orlando, worn out by the extremity of hi...
In tribute to her beloved friend, Woolf allows reality to submit entirely to feeling, spirit and personality, casting Vita Sackville-West as a time-traveller who changes sex at the age of thirty. The result is joyous, riotous, and rings with a deeper truth than 'straight' biography ever could - for ...
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 by Virginia Woolf, Rachel Bowlby, now listed on BookLikes)