Orlando: A Biography

Virginia Woolf’s 1928 novel follows an English nobleman who lives for centuries and changes sex from man to woman. It parodies biography while exploring gender, history, and literary identity.

Biographical fiction: Fiction that presents an invented or fictionalized life in the form of a biography. Woolf imitates the conventions of life-writing while making Orlando’s impossible life its subject.
Virginia Woolf: English modernist writer and essayist, known for novels including Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse. Woolf wrote Orlando as a playful experiment in biography and gender.
Sasha in Orlando: A Russian princess who becomes Orlando’s lover during the novel’s early-seventeenth-century episode. Sasha’s departure initiates Orlando’s enduring reflections on love, loss, and change.
Gender performativity: The idea that gender is produced and reinforced through repeated social acts and conventions. Orlando’s changed sex and continuing identity unsettle the link between gender and social role.
The Great Frost of 1683–84: A severe winter during which the River Thames froze and a frost fair was held on the ice. The frozen Thames provides the setting for Orlando’s meeting with Sasha.
Unreliable narrator: A narrator whose account is limited, distorted, or otherwise not fully trustworthy. The biographer’s interruptions expose the limits of supposedly objective narration.
Vita Sackville-West: English writer and gardener whose relationship with Virginia Woolf inspired Orlando. Woolf dedicated the novel to Sackville-West, whose family history and persona inform its protagonist.
Nick Greene: A satirical character in Orlando who represents literary criticism and the changing fortunes of writers. Greene’s later career lets the novel mock literary judgment and fashionable taste.
Androgyny: The presence or combination of traits conventionally associated with both women and men. The novel presents Orlando’s identity as incorporating qualities assigned to both sexes.
Frost fair: A public festival held on the frozen River Thames during periods of severe winter cold. Woolf uses the fair as a vivid historical stage for Orlando’s early romance.

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