Virginia Woolf's "biography" tells the story of the cross-dressing, sex-changing Orlando who begins life as a young noble in the 16th century and moves through numerous historical and geographical worlds to finish as a modern woman writer in the 1920s. The book is in part a happy tribute to the life that her love for Vita Sackville-West had breathed into Virginia Woolf's own day-to-day existence; it is also Woolf's light-hearted and light-handed teasing out of the assumptions that lie behind the normal conventions for writing about a fictional or historical life.
Orlando was very, very prettily written. I can't say that I know what Virginia Woolf's other writing is like, though supposedly it's very different to Orlando — maybe because Orlando is almost entirely a light-hearted novel. It was a really fun read and I think intended to be that way
