Orlando A Biography
Orlando is a novel by Virginia Woolf, first published in 1928.
A film adaptation of the novel was made in 1993, starring Tilda Swinton as Orlando and Quentin Crisp as Queen Elizabeth: see Orlando (movie).
Orlando is generally considered as one of the most attractive novels by Virginia Woolf, and is one of the most influential books written by a female author, mixing fiction with biography: eventually a project on the history of women's writing in the British Isles was named after the book: see Orlando Project.
Spoiler warning: Plot or ending details follow.
It is the story about a young man named Orlando, born in England during the reign of Elizabeth I, who decides not to grow old. He doesn't, and he passes through the ages as a young man... until he wakes up one morning to find that he has metamorphed into a woman.
Apart from being a knight-like young man, ready for adventure (at the beginning of the book), Woolf's Orlando takes little from the older hero with the same name
Orlando can be read as a roman à clef: the characters Orlando and Princess Sasha in the novel refer to Vita Sackville-West and Violet Trefusis respectively (see: 2nd section of "Violet Trefusis" article). The photographs printed in the illustrated editions of the text are all of the real Vita Sackville-West. Her husband, Harold Nicolson, appears in the novel as Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine. "The Oak", the poem written by Orlando in the novel, refers to the poem The Land with which Vita had won the Hawthornden prize in 1927.
For historical details Woolf draws extensively from Knole and the Sackvilles, a book written (and reworked in several versions) by Vita, describing the historic backgrounds of Knole House in Kent, so the Orlando novel is as well an attractive version of a history book on noble descendance and their mansion (Virginia thought Vita had a "pen of brass").
Fiction (e.g. fictional names, a main character that lives through many centuries,...) allowed Virginia Woolf to write a well-documented biography of a person living in her own age, without being open to criticism about controversial topics as lesbian love etc...: Virginia Woolf was called in to testify in a process about a fictional book written by one of her contemporaries openly defending a transgender-related topic (not even about lesbianism, which was much more anathema in those days), her own book, however, was never contested in this sense (Orlando loves Princess Sasha in the period he appears as a man). Only Vita's mother was not pleased (because the Orlando story was too plain to her in its meaning), she would call Virginia the virgin woolf henceforth. Violet Trefusis' reply would be a more conventional roman à clef (Broderie Anglaise), which loses much of its interest if not knowing the background, while Orlando remains a capturing novel, even if not knowing who is the person on the photographs in the book.
Orlando: A Biography is often named as an elaborate loveletter from Virginia Woolf to Vita Sackville-West, nonetheless Virginia Woolf intended her novel as the first in a new trend, breaking the boundaries between what are traditionally seen as the fiction and non-fiction genres in literature (so the novel is not only about trans-gender, but also about trans-genre, as a manner of speech). Without immediate success in this field, however, since this book is invariably called a "novel" (...while Woolf called it a "biography"), and is also invariably found in the "fiction" section of libraries and bookshops. Only in the last decades of the 20th century authors would try this "tricky" cross-over genre (which differs from "romanticised" or "popularised" non-fiction, and does not necessarily have to take a roman à clef form) again, e.g. Flaubert's Parrot by Julian Barnes (ISBN 0330289764).
