Author(s): Virginia Woolf; Winterson Jeanette (Introduction by)

Classics

The thrill of reading Virginia Woolf's Orlando is the feeling of looking into a whirlpool just as something utterly extraordinary materializes for the first time: an exhilarating hallucination of surreal and beautiful images that remain in memory long after you put the book down. Orlando has it all: life, death, immortality, homoerotic desire, lesbianism, and the evanescence of time. Love, fear, solitude, death, and time-travel--the subjects float by like parasols in the rain. Orlando can be found on countless lists of the finest novels of the 20th century, and is one of Virginia Woolf's major achievements. It is considered one of her greatest works after Mrs. Dalloway and To The Lighthouse.He-for there could be no doubt of his sex, though the fashion of the time did something to disguise it-was in the act of slicing at the head of a Moor which swung from the rafters. It was the colour of an old football, and more or less the shape of one, save for the sunken cheeks and a strand or two of coarse, dry hair, like the hair on a cocoanut. Orlando's father, or perhaps his grandfather, had struck it from the shoulders of a vast Pagan who had started up under the moon in the barbarian fields of Africa; and now it swung, gently, perpetually, in the breeze which never ceased blowing through the attic rooms of the gigantic house of the lord who had slain him.