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Summary
Summary
With an Introduction and Notes by Merry M. Pawlowski, Professor and Chair, Department of English, California State University, Bakersfield.
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.
Author Notes
Virginia Woolf was born in London, England on January 25, 1882. She was the daughter of the prominent literary critic Leslie Stephen. Her early education was obtained at home through her parents and governesses. After death of her father in 1904, her family moved to Bloomsbury, where they formed the nucleus of the Bloomsbury Group, a circle of philosophers, writers, and artists.
During her lifetime, she wrote both fiction and non-fiction works. Her novels included Jacob's Room, Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Orlando, and Between the Acts. Her non-fiction books included The Common Reader, A Room of One's Own, Three Guineas, The Captain's Death Bed and Other Essays, and The Death of the Moth and Other Essays. Having had periods of depression throughout her life and fearing a final mental breakdown from which she might not recover, Woolf drowned herself on March 28, 1941 at the age of 59. Her husband published part of her farewell letter to deny that she had taken her life because she could not face the terrible times of war.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (1)
Choice Review
This publisher's critical editions of the major works of Virginia Woolf offer an important expansion of textual resources for Woolf readers and scholars. For this volume Stape provides a useful introduction and enlightening annotations that include denotations of obscure words and comments on Woolf's historical references and allusions (e.g., to her other writing, to Shakespeare and Jane Austen, to her infatuation with Vita Sackville-West, the inspiration for this fantastical fiction as "biography" experiment). Although Woolf's reliance on Sackville-West's own writing is treated more completely elsewhere (e.g., in Mark Hussey's Virginia Woolf A to Z, CH, Jan'96), Staples provides ample citations from their correspondence. The reader will find a remarkably "clean" text, without footnotes or bracketed editorial clarifications. All endnotes and appendix material--brief lists of emendations and misprints, textual variants--are keyed to page numbers. Most interesting of Woolf s corrections is her deletion from the first proof the passage about Orlando's crossing paths with "that tiresome Mrs. Dalloway." Since Stape corrected without comment some of the irregular punctuation and US spelling inserted into previous editions of the novel, any close reading of the variants in this edition rightly places the focus on those changes made for stylistic reasons. An essential addition to any Woolf collection, upper-division undergraduate through faculty.
Table of Contents
| Chapter 1 p. 13 | |
| Chapter 2 p. 65 | |
| Chapter 3 p. 119 | |
| Chapter 4 p. 153 | |
| Chapter 5 p. 227 | |
| Chapter 6 p. 263 | |
| Index | p. 331 |