The protagonist lives from the Elizabethan age to 1928, changing sex halfway through, serving as Virginia Woolf's love letter to Vita Sackville-West. The novel is a fantasy, a biography, a history of English literature, and a meditation on gender and time. Orlando's house, based on Knole, persists across centuries while Orlando changes and doesn't change. Woolf wrote it quickly, laughingly, and it remains one of her most joyful books. The prose is playful and luminous.