Virginia Woolf's Orlando, "the longest and most charming love letter in literature," playfully constructs the figure of Orlando as the fictional embodiment of Woolf's close friend and lover. Vita Sackville-West. Spanning three centuries of boisterous, fantastic ac[venture, the novel opens as Orlando. a young nobleman in Elizabeth's England, awaits a visit from the Queen and traces his experience with first love as England under lames I lies locked in the embrace of the Great Frost.

At the midpoint of the novel, Orlando. now an ambassador in Constantinople, awakes to find that he is a woman, and the novel indulges in farce and irony to consider the roles of women in the 18th and 19th centuries. As the novel ends in 1928, a year consonant with full suffrage for women, Orlando, now a wife and mother, stands poised at the brink of a future that holds new hope and promise for women. Wordsworth Classics presents this new edition, proclaimed by Woolf"s contemporary Rebecca West as "a poetic masterpiece of the first rank," restoring Woolf"s original photographs and index, with an introduction and notes by Merry M. Pawlowski. LIS scholar in Modernist and Woolf studies.

Orlando as a boy

The Russian Princess as a child

The Archduchess Harriet

Orlando as ambassador

Orlando on her return to England

Orlando about the year 1840

Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine, Esquire

Orlando at the present time