Reading Order
OrlandoVirginia Woolf Orlando Reading Order
Virginia Woolf's Orlando (1928) is her most playful and most subversive novel — the story of Orlando, a young Elizabethan nobleman who lives through four centuries, wakes as a woman at the age of thirty, and eventually arrives at Woolf's own moment of 1928 as the most comprehensive human being in English literature. Written as a gift and a love letter to Vita Sackville-West, whose own aristocratic history provided the real houses and portraits that appear in the novel, Orlando is also Woolf's meditation on the relationship between gender, time, biography, and literary history.
Where to start
Mrs Dalloway
Complete Orlando Book List
- 1Buy
Mrs Dalloway
Virginia Woolf·1925·The essential entry point — Clarissa Dalloway's single day in London; the most emotionally direct of Woolf's experimental novels and the best first Woolf for new readers before the comic virtuosity of Orlando. - 2Buy
Orlando
Virginia Woolf·1928·The novel itself — Orlando's four-century biography through the Elizabethan era to Restoration, eighteenth century, and Woolf's own 1928. - 3Buy
To the Lighthouse
Virginia Woolf·1927·The companion in seriousness — Woolf's most emotionally profound novel, and the one that directly precedes Orlando; the contrast between the two shows the full range of Woolf's tonal possibilities. - 4Buy
The Waves
Virginia Woolf·1931·The most radical companion — Woolf's most experimental novel, following Orlando chronologically; where Orlando plays with time through comedy, The Waves explores time through pure interiority. - 5Buy
Flush: A Biography
Virginia Woolf·1933·Woolf's comic biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's cocker spaniel — the companion to Orlando in her mock-biographical mode; shorter and lighter than Orlando but equally irreverent about the conventions of biography. - 6Buy
Vita Sackville-West: Selected Writings
Vita Sackville-West·2002·Sackville-West's own writing — particularly her poem The Land and her novel The Edwardians — gives context for the woman who inspired Orlando; essential for understanding the novel's biographical and emotional sources. - 7Buy
A Room of One's Own
Virginia Woolf·1929·Woolf's extended essay on women and fiction — published the year after Orlando; the direct non-fiction companion to the argument that Orlando makes through comedy and fantasy about the suppression of women's creative lives across the centuries Orlando traverses.
Orlando — Frequently Asked Questions
What is Virginia Woolf's Orlando about?
Orlando follows a young Elizabethan nobleman who is a favorite of Queen Elizabeth I, lives for more than three centuries through the English literary tradition, wakes as a woman at the age of thirty during the reign of King Charles II, continues through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and arrives at 1928 as Woolf's contemporary. The novel is a biography that explicitly refuses the conventions of biography.
What inspired Virginia Woolf to write Orlando?
Orlando was written as a love letter and gift to Vita Sackville-West, with whom Woolf had an intimate relationship in the 1920s. The novel uses Sackville-West's own aristocratic history — her ancestral home Knole, her portrait in Elizabethan dress — as its raw material, and Orlando is in many ways a portrait of what Sackville-West might have been across the centuries.
Is Orlando feminist?
Orlando is one of the foundational texts of feminist literary theory — its central argument is that gender is a performance and a social construction, and that the same person experiences the world radically differently as a man and as a woman. The Woolf essay 'A Room of One's Own,' published the following year, makes the argument of Orlando explicitly.
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