Orlando

Virginia Woolf’s pioneering novel about a time-traveling sixteenth-century nobleman who wakes up in the body of a woman, with a new foreword by Andrea Lawlor, author of Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl

A Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition, with flaps and deckle-edged paper

First masculine, then feminine, Orlando is a young sixteenth-century nobleman who gallops through the centuries, from Elizabethan England and imperial Turkey to Virginia Woolf’s own time. Will he find happiness with the exotic Russian Princess Sasha? Or is the dashing explorer Shelmerdine the ideal man? And what form will Orlando take on the journey—a nobleman, traveler, writer? Man or . . . woman?
 
Written for the charismatic, bisexual writer Vita Sackville-West, Orlando is one of Woolf’s most popular and accessible novels, a playful mock biography of a chameleon-like historical figure that is both a wry commentary on gender and, in Woolf’s own words, a “writer’s holiday” that delights in its ambiguity and capriciousness.

This edition is collated from all known proofs, manuscripts, and impressions to reflect the author’s intentions, and includes an introduction and notes by the distinguished scholar and coauthor of The Madwoman in the Attic Sandra M. Gibert.

For more than seventy-five years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 2,000 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.