Reader Score
82%
82% of readers
recommend this book
Orlando is, in fact, a character liberated from the restraints of time and sex. Born in the Elizabethan Age to wealth and position, he is a young male aristocrat at the beginning of the story - and a modern woman four centuries later. The hero-heroine sees monarchs come and go, hobnobs with great literary figures, and slips in and out of each new fashion. Woolf presents a brilliant pageant of history, society, and literature as well as subtle appreciation of the interplay between endings and beginnings, past and present, male and female.
Lauren Groff is an author.
Only tonight, decades after first encountering him onscreen, did I understand that Orlando Bloom is the decades-delayed personification of high modernism, the marriage of Virginia Woolf and James Joyce in one tidy lovely elfin package.
Jonathan Mandell, Journalist and theater critic.
Another exciting-sounding new season at @signatureinnyc January: @domorisseau's "Sunset Baby," ex political prisoner meets daughter April: Taylor Mac stars in Sarah Ruhl's adaptation of Virginia Woolf's "Orlando" Dave Malloy’s Three Houses, "a Post-Pandemic Open Mic Night" https://t.co/SEZME3uW0G
Literature Cambridge offers courses on great literature in English, taught by academics and open to the public. Summer courses and online study sessions.
Places are filling in our 2023 live online summer course on Virginia Woolf's Women. Five days' intensive study of 5 books: Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Orlando, A Room of One's Own, Between the Acts. 10-14 July. https://t.co/pFpCPPVLv9 https://t.co/aS7gf18gxx
"As a work of political satire and feminist fantasy, Orlando laid the groundwork for today's cultural landscape, in which the boundaries of both gender and literary genre are more porous than ever . . . If published today, Orlando might have been misshelved not as biography but as fantasy or science fiction -- genres in which women writers in recent years have increasingly found the space to challenge the straight-white-male strictures of both realist fiction and reality itself. Orlando's blend of social critique and bold fantasy echoes in the postwar fiction of Ursula Le Guin and Angela Carter, and more recently in the fairy-tale retellings of Helen Oyeyemi and Daniel Mallory Ortberg -- as well as in novels like Melissa Broder's The Pisces." --Vulture, "Orlando is the Virginia Woolf Novel We Need Right Now" --