Orlando

Virginia Woolf''s fantastical novel about an Elizabethan nobleman who lives for three centuries and transitions into a woman, with a new introduction by Carmen Maria Machado. The long-lived protagonist of <Orlando< begins as a passionate teenage aristocrat, whose days are spent in rowdy revelry at the colorful Tudor court of Queen Elizabeth and his nights in writing earnest poetry. A favorite of the elderly queen, he falls in love with and is jilted by a wayward Russian princess. Two kings later, now in his thirties, Orlando is sent to serve as ambassador to Constantinople, where he awakens one day to find himself in the body of a woman. The Lady Orlando takes this circumstance in stride. She returns to England, engages in love affairs with both men and women, consorts with the famous poets of each age, finds happiness with a gender-nonconforming husband, and at last achieves publication of her own epic poem in the year 1928. A playful and exuberant romp through history, <Orlando <is Woolf’s most lighthearted and unusual novel. ;VINTAGE CLASSICS.

Auteur
VIRGINIA WOOLF (1882-1941) was born in London. A pioneer in the narrative use of stream of consciousness, she published her first novel, The Voyage Out, in 1915. This was followed by literary criticism and essays, most notably A Room of One’s Own, and other acclaimed novels, including Mrs. Dalloway,&#160;To the Lighthouse, and Orlando.

About the Introducer:
CARMEN MARIA MACHADO is a short story&#160;author, essayist, and critic best known for her story collection, Her Body and Other Parties, aand a memoir, In the Dream House, which won the 2021&#160;Folio Prize. Machado is frequently published in The New Yorker, NPR, Granta, and elsewhere, and she has been a finalist for the Nebula Award and the National Book Award.

Texte du rabat

Virginia Woolf's fantastical novel about an Elizabethan nobleman who lives for three centuries and transitions into a woman, with a new introduction by Carmen Maria Machado.

The long-lived protagonist of Orlando begins as a passionate teenage aristocrat, whose days are spent in rowdy revelry at the colorful Tudor court of Queen Elizabeth and his nights in writing earnest poetry. A favorite of the elderly queen, he falls in love with and is jilted by a wayward Russian princess. Two kings later, now in his thirties, Orlando is sent to serve as ambassador to Constantinople, where he awakens one day to find himself in the body of a woman. The Lady Orlando takes this circumstance in stride. She returns to England, engages in love affairs with both men and women, consorts with the famous poets of each age, finds happiness with a gender-nonconforming husband, and at last achieves publication of her own epic poem in the year 1928. A playful and exuberant romp through history, Orlando is Woolf’s most lighthearted and unusual novel. &#160;VINTAGE CLASSICS.

Échantillon de lecture
from the Introduction by Jeanette Winterson

“Yesterday morning I was in despair... I couldn’t screw a word from me; and at last dropped my head in my hands: dipped my pen in the ink, and wrote these words, as if automatically, on a clean sheet: Orlando: a Biography . . . [I]t sprung upon me how I could revolutionise biography in a night...”&#160; —Virginia Woolf to Vita Sackville-West, 9 October 1927

It was playful and bold to write a novel as though it were a biography, and to call a fiction a life, and to invent that life around a woman the author was in love with, and to stretch her over 400 years, like a body freed from the problems of gravity.

In Orlando (1928), Virginia Woolf did away with the usual co-ordinates of biography and set off through time as though it were an element, not a dimension. The story is simple: Orlando is a young nobleman, aged 16, in the reign of Elizabeth I. After a series of adventures and disappointments in love and life and poetry, he takes an appointment as the British ambassador in Constantinople. Aged 30, he wakes up one morning from a week-long dead sleep to find that he is now a woman. Orlando returns to England and discovers that it changes as centuries pass but he, or rather she, continues as before.

Woolf wrote the book at top speed, scarcely pausing, as Orlando scarcely pauses as he races through 400 years. On 11 October 1928 – the last day in the novel – Orlando has reached the age of 36: “The true length of a person’s life, whatever the Dictionary of National Biography may say, is always a matter of dispute.” This is a poke at Woolf’s father, Sir Leslie Stephen, the great and erudite editor of the DNB. The Victorians loved dates and facts, especially dates and facts in order – theirs was the age of classification, of tax – onomy, of the museum, the geographical society, the butterfly net. The pinned wings or the shot and stuffed head are symbols of Victorian England. The Dictionary of National Biography, where the great and the good could be safely pinned and stuffed, was, to Woolf, part of the monstrous edifice of the 19th century that 20th-century creativity needed to overthrow.

As Orlando enters the 19th century she notices, to her dismay, “widow’s weeds and bridal veils . . . crystal palaces, bassinettes, military helmets, memorial wreaths, trousers, whiskers, wedding cakes, cannon, Christmas trees, telescopes, extinct monsters, globes, maps, elephants, and mathematical instruments”. In one of the funniest passages in the novel, Orlando suffers a kind of self-generated electric shock treatment as her left hand takes to convulsing spontaneously. She realises that it is because she is not wearing a wedding ring. She rushes out and finds a husband, and thus subsides the censorious somatic symptom of an age where every woman must be classified as virgin, wife or widow. And male or female.

Woolf was born in 1882. She grew up as a Victorian. Gender roles were strictly observed in society and at her London home in Hyde Park Gate. Her brother Thoby went to Cambridge; Virginia and her sister Vanessa were educated at home. The social doctrine they were raised on was that of “separate spheres” – woman in the home, man in the world – and it was still going strong when Woolf published Orlando, in the year that all female British citizens over 21 finally got the vote.

But Woolf believed that the creative mind is androgynous. She was an expert in Elizabethan literature. She loved both the scope and the certainty of the Renaissance mind. Shakespeare, writing his sonnets to boys and women with equal passion, understanding the manliness of a soldier, the intensity of a nun, seemed to her to be a sign of what we all might be – bigger, wider, freed from convention and hypocrisy.

Woolf met Vita Sackville-West in 1922. Sackville-West was an English aristocrat brought up at Knole in Kent. As a woman, she could not inherit the ancestral home. Woolf, who had fallen in love with Sackville- West’s past as much as her person, found that the family portraits, ancient relics and priceless objects that filled Knole filled her imagination. But Orlando is more than a fantasy or a historical novel; it is highly political. Orlando is a savage satire on sexism.

When Orlando becomes a woman, Knole and all his/her affairs are put into chancery, because a woman cannot be a duke, and a woman cannot be an ambassador to the Turks, and a woman cannot inherit one of the finest houses in England. But a woman can crossdress. Once Orlando becomes Lady Orlando, he must make his skirmishes across gender by dressing up. This he does frequently, in order to meet with life outside drawing rooms and carriages.

Sackville-West often dressed as a man and had affairs with other women in her disguise as “Julian”. She had an …