Name: Orlando: A Biography
Price: 1000.00 TWD
Availability: InStock
Author: Virginia Woolf
ISBN: 9780192818256

Type

Physical Book

Author

Virginia Woolf

Publisher

Oxford University Press

Language

English

Format

Hardcover

ISBN13

9780192818256

Synopsis "Orlando: A Biography"

He-for there could be no doubt about his sex, though the fashion of the time did something to disguise it-was in the act of slicing at the head of a Moor which swung from the rafters. It was the colour of an old football, and more or less the shape of one, save for the sunken cheeks and a strand or two of coarse, dry hair, like the hair of a coconut. Orlando's father, or perhaps his grandfather, had struck it from the shoulders of a vast Pagan who had started up under the moon in the barbarian fields of Africa; and now it swung, gently, perpetually, in the breeze which never ceased blowing through the attic rooms of the gigantic house of the lord who had slain him. Orlando's fathers had ridden in fields of asphodel, and stony fields, and fields watered by strange rivers, and they had struck many heads of many colours off many shoulders, and brought them back to hang from the rafters. So too would Orlando, he vowed. But since he was sixteen only, and too young to ride with them in Africa or France, he would steal away from his mother and the peacocks in the garden and go to his attic room and there lunge and plunge and slice the air with his blade. Sometimes he cut the cord so that the skull bumped on the floor and he had to string it up again, fastening it with some chivalry almost out of reach so that his enemy grinned at him through shrunk, black lips triumphantly.

Virginia Woolf

(Author)

View Author's Page

Virginia Woolf was born in London on January 25, 1882, and died on March 28, 1941, drowned in the River Ouse. After her father's death, the well-known man of letters Sir Leslie Stephen, Virginia and her sister Vanessa left the elegant Kensington neighborhood and moved to the bohemian Bloomsbury, which named the brilliant literary group formed around the Stephen sisters. Among its members were T. S. Eliot, Bertrand Russell, Vita Sackville-West, and the writer Leonard Woolf, whom Virginia married and with whom she ran the prestigious Hogarth Press. From her early works, Virginia Woolf highlighted her intention to take novels beyond mere narration. In Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927), the author expressed the inner feelings of the characters with her own techniques, achieving great psychological effects through images, metaphors, and symbols. Her technique was consolidated with Orlando (1931) and The Waves (1931), which secured her an indisputable place within the finest world literature. Additionally, Woolf wrote essays as famous as A Room of One's Own (1929), which still inspires new generations of women today, literary criticism articles like those compiled in The Common Reader (1925, 1932) and in Genius and Ink (2021), or the biography of the English poet Elizabeth Barrett's dog, Flush (1933). All these works are published by Lumen.

See less