Orlando: Macmillan Collector's Library

Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) was an English novelist. Born in London, she was raised in a family of eight children by Julia Prinsep Jackson, a model and philanthropist, and Leslie Stephen, a writer and critic. Homeschooled alongside her sisters, including famed painter Vanessa Bell, Woolf was introduced to classic literature at an early age. Following the death of her mother in 1895, Woolf suffered her first mental breakdown. Two years later, she enrolled at King¿s College London, where she studied history and classics and encountered leaders of the burgeoning women¿s rights movement. Another mental breakdown accompanied her father¿s death in 1904, after which she moved with her Cambridge-educated brothers to Bloomsbury, a bohemian district on London¿s West End. There, she became a member of the influential Bloomsbury Group, a gathering of leading artists and intellectuals including Lytton Strachey, John Maynard Keynes, Vanessa Bell, E.M. Forster, and Leonard Woolf, whom she would marry in 1912. Together they founded the Hogarth Press, which would publish most of Woolf¿s work. Recognized as a central figure of literary modernism, Woolf was a gifted practitioner of experimental fiction, employing the stream of consciousness technique and mastering the use of free indirect discourse, a form of third person narration which allows the reader to enter the minds of her characters. Woolf, who produced such masterpieces as Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), Orlando (1928), and A Room of One¿s Own (1929), continued to suffer from depression throughout her life. Following the German Blitz on her native London, Woolf, a lifelong pacifist, died by suicide in 1941. Her career cut cruelly short, she left a legacy and a body of work unmatched by any English novelist of her day.

If you have always wanted to read Woolf but feel intimidated, Orlando is a good place to start. And you can't go wrong with this new Oxford edition.
This is a classic of world literature, and folks must at least attempt to read it to learn what is wrong or right with it. Thus, I recommend this novel for the purchase by all public and academic libraries, and private buyers.

List of illustrations; General editors' preface; Notes on the edition; Acknowledgements; Chronology of Virginia Woolf's life and work; List of abbreviations; List of archival sources for manuscript, typescript and proof material relating to Orlando; List of editorial symbols; Introduction; Chronology of the composition of Orlando; Sackville biographical table; Sackville family tree; Orlando; Explanatory notes; Textual apparatus; Textual notes; Bibliography.