Orlando

Orlando: A Biography is a novel by the English writer Virginia Woolf, first published on 11 October 1928 by the Hogarth Press.

The book begins with a wealthy young nobleman in the Elizabethan age and ends with a woman in the twentieth century, and it is the same person throughout. Orlando writes poetry, falls in and out of favour at court, and lives through centuries without aging the way other people do, meeting figures from English literary history along the way. The novel is written as though it were a biography, with all the apparatus of one, and it uses that form to say something satirical about how English literature has been written about. Woolf based part of it on the family history of Vita Sackville-West, her close friend, and it has been read since as a book about gender as much as about literature. The book has been adapted several times, including Sally Potter's 1992 film with Tilda Swinton in the title role, and it entered the public domain in the United States in 2024.