Orlando is a courtly boy in Elizabethan England and is a woman, a writer, in 1920's London and is a fictionalization of Woolf's longtime lover, Vita Sackville-West, and is all of us, probably. Take it away Virginia!:
"These selves of which we are built up, one on top of another, as plates are piled on a waiter's hand, have attachments elsewhere, sympathies, little constitutions and rights of their own, call them what you will (and for many of these things there is no name) so that one will only come if it is raining, another in a room with green curtains, another when Mrs Jones is not there, another if you can promise it a glass of wine–and so on; for everybody can multiply from his own experience the different terms which his different selves have made with him–and some are too wildly ridiculous to be mentioned in print at all." - From Orlando
— Landon
In 1926, Vita Sackville-West wrote to Woolf, “I am reduced to a thing that wants Virginia.” In 1927, Virginia Woolf wrote Orlando. Sackville-West’s son called it the “longest and most charming love letter in literature.” I call it her funniest book by far. Journey through four hundred years of British history with young Orlando as Woolf muses on poetry, fashion, her love of Russian literature, and the fluidity of both time and gender.
— Franki"As a work of political satire and feminist fantasy, Orlando laid the groundwork for today’s cultural landscape, in which the boundaries of both gender and literary genre are more porous than ever . . . If published today, Orlando might have been misshelved not as biography but as fantasy or science fiction — genres in which women writers in recent years have increasingly found the space to challenge the straight-white-male strictures of both realist fiction and reality itself. Orlando’s blend of social critique and bold fantasy echoes in the postwar fiction of Ursula Le Guin and Angela Carter, and more recently in the fairy-tale retellings of Helen Oyeyemi and Daniel Mallory Ortberg — as well as in novels like Melissa Broder’s The Pisces." —Vulture, "Orlando is the Virginia Woolf Novel We Need Right Now" —