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Loading... Orlando: A Biographyby Virginia Woolf
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. This is a great book, extremely well written and the storyline is interesting. Orlando, who is Elizabeth I's favourite pet companion, lives an adventurous life through the following ages and centuries, in different nations. His/her change of gender in Turkey sends her into a confusion of the genres, whilst reflecting the ages' preoccupations. Whilst elevated, the language is lyrical, sometimes poetical and practical, with a focus on Orlando's own narrative inner voice, her reflections on life, society and her role within a seemingly linear chronology. Orlando's life is a reflection of Vita Sackville West's familiar grounds and life. Some readers may interpret the book as a declaration of love or as a philosophical discussion about gender and a nation's historical changes through Orlando's life. It is open to interpretation and it is well worth reading the book for the multitude of questions it opens. A highly recommended classic. A favourite from first year University that left me with a lingering (and sadly unfulfilled) desire to have a tumultuous affair with a Russian ice skater. amazon PD: Virginia Woolf's Orlando 'The longest and most charming love letter in literature', playfully constructs the figure of Orlando as the fictional embodiment of Woolf's close friend and lover, Vita Sackville-West. Spanning three centuries, the novel opens as Orlando, a young nobleman in Elizabeth's England, awaits a visit from the Queen and traces his experience with first love as England under James I lies locked in the embrace of the Great Frost. At the midpoint of the novel, Orlando, now an ambassador in Costantinople, awakes to find that he is a woman, and the novel indulges in farce and irony to consider the roles of women in the 18th and 19th centuries. As the novel ends in 1928, a year consonant with full suffrage for women. Orlando, now a wife and mother, stands poised at the brink of a future that holds new hope and promise for women. Virginia W. said this was her throwaway book, not to be taken seriously and not to trouble herself too much over. Sort of her "beach" read. I loved it almost more than her serious works of art. Woolfe isn't known much for the fantastical or the humourous, but Orlando has these things. A fascinating experiment in time and gender. no reviews | add a review
Amazon.com (ISBN 015670160X, Paperback)In 1928, way before everyone else was talking about gender-bending and way, way before the terrific movie with Tilda Swinton, Virginia Woolf wrote her comic masterpiece, a fantastic, fanciful love letter disguised as a biography, to Vita Sackville-West. Orlando enters the book as an Elizabethan nobleman and leaves the book three centuries and one change of gender later as a liberated woman of the 1920s. Along the way this most rambunctious of Woolf's characters engages in sword fights, trades barbs with 18th century wits, has a baby, and drives a car. This is a deliriously written, breathless-making book and a classic both of lesbian literature and the Western canon.(retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:57:56 -0400) The first test round has been closed. Visit the Open Shelves Classification group for details. |
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This publication of this book in 1928, was a hallmark in literature, especially in regard to women's writing and gender studies, for obvious reasons. (