Folio Society Published Works Number 2846
Woolf, Virginia - Orlando
We buy and sell items like these, so please contact us if you have similar items for sale, and we will make you an offer if we are interested.
To check if we have this item, or similar items, in stock, please click the Check Stock link below. Alternatively, use the links on the left to search our large online database of items for sale, or to visit the rest of the site.
Check Stock
Woolf, Virginia - Orlando (Published in by The Folio Society in 2013. Introduced by Jeanette Winterson. Posing as a biography, Orlando spans 400 years in the fantastical life of a young nobleman whose adventures take an unexpected twist when he wakes one day to find he has become a woman. Introduced by Jeanette Winterson. This exuberant book has been described in many ways. Virginia Woolf declared it 'a writer's holiday' – a break from the seriousness and earnestness that she felt bound by in her career as a novelist. To Jeanette Winterson, who introduces the Folio edition, it is a joyful fantasy, a historical novel and a 'savage satire on sexism'. And to Nigel Nicolson, Orlando is 'the longest and most charming love letter in literature', written to his mother, Vita Sackville-West. Production Details. Orlando book. Bound in buckram. Blocked with a design by Neil Gower. Set in Adobe Caslon. 240 pages. 15 illustrations. Book size: 9.5" x 6.25". The longest and most charming love letter in literature. Posing as a biography, Orlando spans 400 years in the fantastical life of a young nobleman and favourite of Queen Elizabeth I whose adventures take an unexpected twist when he wakes from a week-long sleep to find he has become a woman. He/she lives through many ages, experiencing the Great Frost of the early 18th century, befriending Alexander Pope and living as a wife and poet in 1920s London, but never ages beyond 36 years. Woolf saw the book as an opportunity to send up her own writerly postulations: 'Had Orlando … died for a week, and then come to life again? And if so, of what nature is death, and of what nature life? Having waited well over half an hour for an answer to these questions, and none coming, let us get on with the story.' But Orlando was also a gift to Vita, with whom she had had a passionate affair. The protagonist's childhood home is Knole, the sprawling Kent mansion of the Sackville-Wests which, as a woman, Vita could never inherit. Orlando's handsome physique pays compliment to her beauty. Orlando's gender change and cross-dressing echo her romantic adventures, which included wooing female lovers in the garb of a man. In real life both women resisted the boundaries imposed by their gender; in this bold novel Woolf critiques stereotypes and conventions by pushing the boundaries of her imagination, perhaps more than in any of her other novels. The first edition of Orlando included photographs of Sackville-West, some of them taken specifically for the book. Woolf 's chosen images are included here, signalling Orlando's dual identity and the author's unabashed presentation of the novel as a paean to Sackville-West. She also included photographs of four portraits, which are still housed at Knole and Sissinghurst. Happily we were able to reshoot three of them in colour for this edition. )
