Orlando HB Everymans Library Classics

Orlando: A Biography is Virginia Woolf’s playful, genre-defying 1928 novel about a young English nobleman who lives for more than three centuries and, halfway through the book, awakens as a woman. Beginning at Queen Elizabeth I’s court, Orlando moves through changing eras of English history—romance, diplomacy, poetry, marriage, and public life—while ageing only into their thirties.

Presented as a mock biography, the novel uses wit, fantasy, and historical satire to question fixed ideas about gender, sex, identity, authorship, inheritance, social convention, and time. Orlando’s transformation allows Woolf to explore how the world treats a person differently when perceived as a woman, while maintaining that personality and inner life exceed any single social category.