Orlando - by Virginia Woolf (Hardcover)

About the Book

Virginia Woolf's dazzling romp through four hundred years of English history.

Book Synopsis

Designed to appeal to the book lover, the Macmillan Collector's Library is a series of beautifully bound pocket-sized gift editions of much loved classic titles. Bound in real cloth, printed on high quality paper, and featuring ribbon markers and gilt edges, Macmillan Collector's Library are books to love and treasure.

One of BBC's 100 Novels That Shaped Our World.

Virginia Woolf's wildly imaginative, comic novel was inspired by the life of her lover, Vita Sackville West.

This edition features original illustrations and with an introduction by the academic and novelist, Professor Susan Sellers.

Orlando is a young Elizabethan nobleman whose wealth and status afford him an extravagant lifestyle. Appointed ambassador in Constantinople, he wakes one morning to find he is a woman. Unperturbed by such a dramatic transformation, and losing none of his flamboyance and ambition, the newly female Orlando charges through life and English history so that by the end of this extraordinary biography she is a modern, 1920s woman.

About the Author

Virginia Woolf was born in 1882, the youngest daughter of the Victorian writer Sir Leslie Stephen. She was educated at home with her sister, Vanessa, in a literary environment. The death of Woolf's mother in 1895 and her father in 1904 led to the first of the serious nervous breakdowns that would come to feature heavily in her life. Shortly afterwards she moved with her sister and two of her brothers to 46 Gordon Square, which was to be the first meeting place of the circle of writers and artists known as the Bloomsbury Group. In 1912 Virginia married Leonard Woolf, with whom she would later establish the Hogarth Press, and also published her first novel, The Voyage Out. It would be followed by eight others, including Mrs Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927), which together established her position as one of the most important modernists of the twentieth century. Woolf committed suicide in 1941.