Orlando A Biography

FROM THE FOREWORD BY PHILIP DOSSICK



The thrill of reading Virginia Woolf’s Orlando is the feeling of looking into a whirlpool just as something utterly extraordinary materializes for the first time: an exhilarating hallucination of surreal and beautiful images that remain in memory long after you put the book down.

The language itself dazzles: vivid, evocative, poetic language, that challenges the best of James Joyce, with Woolf's gift for inner dialogue—the lies her characters relentlessly tell themselves—which in turn reveal them to us. 

Orlando has it all: life, death, immortality, homoerotic desire, lesbianism, and the evanescence of time. Love, fear, solitude, death, and time-travel—the subjects float by like parasols in the rain. 

Her characters are striking. We live in that troubled universe with them. In the tragic futility, the absurdity, the divine pathos, the delicate beauty of contemplation, all of life happens. Instinctively, she understands that the beauty of the human landscape resides in its melancholy.

Orlando can be found on countless lists of the finest novels of the 20th century, and is one of Virginia Woolf's major achievements. It is considered one of her greatest works after Mrs. Dalloway and To The Lighthouse. 

Stick with it and you’ll find this landmark novel a captivating reward well worth the effort.

PHILIP DOSSICK


VIRGINIA WOOLF (1882-1941), one of the greatest authors of the twentieth century, transformed the art of fiction. The author of numerous novels and short stories, she was also an acknowledged master of the essay form, and an admired literary critic.


PHILIP DOSSICK is the New York Times critically acclaimed writer and director of the motion picture The P.O.W. He has written for television, including the outstanding drama, Transplant, produced by David Susskind for CBS. His most recent books include Aztecs: Epoch Of Social Revolution, Sex And Dreams, Mark Twain In Seattle, The Naked Citizen: Notes On Privacy In The Twenty-First Century, and Raymond Chowder And Bob Skloot Must Die.