Roundly considered Woolf’s most playful work, Orlando is the ‘biography’ of a unique individual; a protagonist whose search for satisfaction, for a full and all-encompassing life, is entirely unbound by convention. Starting out as an Elizabethan boy, Orlando travels through distant lands and through centuries on a quest to find self-expression, before becoming a twentieth-century female writer. Conceived as a cryptic love letter from Woolf to Vita Sackville-West, Orlando is an ambitious and revolutionary epic that experiments with form and character to create a work that is at once challenging and exuberant.
Behind the quiet confidence of Virginia Woolf’s stream-of-consciousness prose was a tumultuous and tragic personal life. A member of England’s influential Bloomsbury Set, she died by suicide in 1941. Her position as one of the greatest ever female – and modernist – writers is incontestable.
About the cover: ´The Four Directions´ by Alice Maher celebrates the snail: self-sufficient, hermaphrodite, visceral, a creature of the undergrowth. Like Orlando the sculpture draws us to emerging identities.