Orlando: a biography

En 1928, Virginia Woolf imagine la vie d’Orlando, né homme dans l’Angleterre élisabéthaine, devenu femme à Constantinople au XVIIe siècle, qui traverse les époques jusqu’au présent. Un siècle plus tard, ce texte hybride, qui échappe à toute catégorisation et se joue des normes, continue de nous interroger sur notre rapport au genre, à l’histoire et aux identités individuelles et collectives.

Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, a fantastic figure defying the constraints of time and gender, continues to fascinate. Woolf has us meet him as a young aristocrat in Elizabethan England, follow his loves, disappointments and ambitions to Constantinople where he becomes she, then keep on her trace as she traverses Enlightenment and Victorian London before arriving with a shock in the present of 1928 as an accomplished poetess of 36 years of age. This volume explores Woolf’s queer approach to biography, her writing of history, and the politics and ethics of the text’s treatment of gender, empire, race, class and identity — lending an ear all the while to its laughter, play, and musings on love, solitude, and literature. This mock-biography of Vita Sackville-West, which Woolf planned “as an escapade” and dashed off faster than her other works, marked an unexpected turning point in her career, bringing her commercial success and financial stability. Yet its soaring popularity in recent years would have surpassed all her expectations. If we return to it so often, it is perhaps because Orlando’s constancy and metamorphoses make her story an extraordinary affirmation of liberty.