Orlando: A Biography Study Guide

Orlando: A Biography Plot Summary

Preview of Orlando: A Biography Summary:

Orlando is a fictional biography of a person called Orlando who lives over three hundred years from Queen Elizabeth's reign in the sixteenth century through to King Edwards reign in 1928, the year Virginia Woolf wrote the novel. In the beginning of the book Orlando is a nobleman who has literary ambitions. As a man he writes plays and poems every day of his life while courting some of his generation's most beautiful women. Everything changes when he turns into woman, and for the remainder, Woolf draws comparisons between the thought processes of men and women across the different eras.

In the first chapter, Orlando is a fifteen-year-old boy living with his parents. He dreams of joining his father and grandfather in the war against the Moors, but Queen Elizabeth takes to his exceptional beauty and refuses to allow him to fight. However, he falls out of favor with the...
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