Virginia Woolf, Orlando: A Biography (1928)
 
 

     Virginia Woolf, one of the founders of the movement known as Modernism, is one of the most important woman writers in
     English. Her "stream-of-consciousness" essays and novels provide an invaluable insight into both her own life experiences
     and those of women at the beginning of the twentieth century. Her most famous works include Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To
     the Lighthouse (1927), The Waves (1931), and her most recognized work, A Room of One's Own (1929).
 

            Orlando: A Biography, published in 1928, was not Woolf's most famous work, but it was one of her most intense
          considerations of gender. Through the life of the extraordinary character Orlando, Woolf examines the meanings of
          masculinity and femininity as these definitions changed in Europe over the course of four hundred years. In tracing
          those changes, Woolf presents a feminist overview of history from the days of Elizabeth the First to the end of
          World War I. Orlando, who was modeled on Woolf's close friend Vita Sackville-West, goes from being a young man
          in Queen Elizabeth's court to a love affair with a Muscovite princess; from Ambassador Extraordinary to encounters,
          now as Lady Orlando, with the famous English writers Pope, Addison, and Swift; finally, Orlando experiences
          childbirth.
 
 

 Copyright  Prepared by Professor Catherine Lavender for History 182 (Women's History and Feminist Theory), The Department of History, The
     College of Staten Island of The City University of New York, Fall Semester 1997. Last modified: Monday 13 October 1997