Orlando (Paperback)

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

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.

Reviews

“I read [Orlando] about once every four or five years. To check my evolution against it. It’s a magic mirror of a book, which I first tucked under my pillow when I was 15 and which, somehow, reliably keeps reflecting back each phase of life at me, leaf by leaf.” —Tilda Swinton in The New York Times Book Review

About the Author

Virginia Woolf (1882–1941), one of the great twentieth-century authors, was at the center of the Bloomsbury Group and is a major figure in the history of literary feminism and modernism. She published her first novel, The Voyage Out, in 1915, and between 1925 and 1931 produced what are now regarded as her finest masterpieces, including Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), and The Waves (1931). She also maintained an astonishing output of literary criticism, short fiction, journalism, and biography, including the playfully subversive Orlando (1928) and the passionate feminist essay A Room of One’s Own (1929).
Andrea Lawlor (foreword) is the author of Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl, a modern homage to Orlando that was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Fiction. The winner of a Whiting Award, they teach writing at Mount Holyoke College.
Sandra M. Gilbert (1936-2024; introduction, notes) was Professor Emerita at the University of California, Davis, and co-author, with Susan Gubar, of the classic work of feminist literary criticism The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination.