Virginia Woolf's 1928 novel Orlando is her most entertaining and exciting book. The mock biography recounts the life of a sixteenth-century nobleman who ends up as a woman writer in 1920s England. Over the centuries Orlando lives through the gamut of human experience as both a man and a woman. It is an irreverent send-up of dutifully rendered biographies of great men, a tongue-in-cheek commentary on some formal innovations in Woolf's novels, and a carefully masked portrait of Vita Sackville-West, the real-life aristocrat who swept into Woolf's life and heart. Woolf's exuberance in realizing that a faux biography afforded her an entirely new inventive freedom animates this frolicsome gallop across four centuries.

VIRGINIA WOOLF (1882-1941), an English writer, is considered one of the most important modernist authors of all time. Her novels include Jacob's Room, Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Orlando, and The Waves. Until her death by suicide in 1941, she was at the center of The Bloomsbury Group in London, a circle of immensely influential writers, artists, and intellectuals who created new paradigms for life during a time of great cultural, economic, and political upheaval.