In the Library
Orlando
Virginia Woolf, 1928
- Form
- Form Novel
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 5.5 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 7
- Length
- Length 79k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
For she had a great variety of selves to call upon.
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
If you like this, try
The Tale of Genji
Murasaki Shikibu
Murasaki wrote the original novel of a beautiful person moving through centuries of court life, a thousand years before Woolf.
£1.99
Mrs Dalloway
Virginia Woolf
Woolf's other masterpiece of a single consciousness moving through time, but compressed to one day instead of four centuries.
£1.99
Middlemarch
George Eliot
Eliot writes the same question of what a brilliant woman can become, but without the freedom of changing sex or century.
£1.99
About the book
The Thames freezes so hard that a whole carnival springs up on the ice, and a young nobleman, skating out across the locked river, loses his heart to a Russian princess he can barely understand. It is one scene from a life that will run nearly four hundred years while ageing only a few dozen, a life begun as a favourite at the court of Elizabeth. Somewhere in the middle of it, Orlando wakes from a long sleep to find that the body in the bed is now a woman's, and receives the news with no more fuss than a change of weather. Woolf's mock biography keeps exactly that tone: arch, delighted, faintly scandalous, written for Vita Sackville-West and reading like the longest love letter in English. What it knows, and proves with a straight face, is that the self outlasts both the century's fashions and the body's sex. Orlando in doublet and Orlando in crinoline are unmistakably one consciousness, and the same oak tree still stands in the garden, waiting for the poem that has taken centuries to finish.