Orlando

One of the BBC's '100 Novels That Shaped Our World'

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‘Orlando had become a woman – there is no denying it. But in every other respect, Orlando remained precisely as he had been. The change of sex, though it altered their future, did nothing whatever to alter their identity.’

Boisterous and defiant, Virginia Woolf’s queer classic subverts restraints of genre, time and gender. Traversing the complexities of human emotion and society’s obsession with conformity, the wild adventures of Woolf’s gender fluid hero begin in Elizabethan England and end in 1928 – yet Orlando ages just 36 years.

A satirical romp that spans over three hundred years of history, Woolf’s fantastical biography was decades ahead of its time.