Orlando by Virginia Woolf (1928)

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.