A classic of the feminist and queer canons, Orlando is loosely based on the life of Virginia Woolf's lover and friend, Vita Sackville-West. But it's a story that playfully bends and breaks the bounds of reality.
When the book begins, Orlando is living richly as a nobleman in the court of Queen Elizabeth I. After awakening one day transformed into a woman, Orlando returns to England and must navigate a society that suddenly treats her freedom, inheritance, and ambitions very differently. From glittering Elizabethan courts to the bustle of the nineteenth century, Orlando travels through 300 years without seeming to age. An important work of modernist queer fiction, the book moves in strange and unexpected ways, making a smart satire of literary history. At once imaginative and sharp-eyed, it remains one of Woolf's most original and beloved novels.