Orlando

Published by Hogarth Press in 1928, Orlando is at once an oddity, an indulgence, but also a slice of genius. The novel – because despite masquerading as a biography, it is a work of narrative fiction – tells the unlikely, impossible story of Orlando through his years as a male member of the Elizabethan Court, an affair with a Russian Princess, a subdued period of contemplation during the reign of James 1, his time as an ambassador in Constantinople and the sudden transformation into a woman. Not content with such a plot twist Woolf allows her character to live on through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, using the journey to trace the female place in society while allowing Orlando the freedom to seduce, be seduced and to love in equal measure. After 80,000 words, Woolf leaves her heroine in the England of 1928 having completed a poem, The Oak Tree, that had been started some four centuries earlier.