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Orlando

A Biography

by Virginia Woolf

Length 10 hours 9 minutes

Language English

Narrators Stefan Rudnicki & Gabrielle de Cuir

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Bookseller recommendation

“Orlando is one of my favorite Virginia Woolf books. The titular character is inspired by Woolf's lover, Vita Sackville-West, and at the start of the novel, he is a sixteen-year-old boy living in Queen Elizabeth I's court. This epic spans three centuries, and by its end, Orlando is a thirty-six-year-old woman. Strange, funny, and ahead of its time, Orlando examines themes of sexuality and gender identity in ways hardly seen before. ”
— Carissa • Brilliant Books Audio

Summary
About the author
About the narrators

“I’m sick to death of this particular self. I want another.”

Virginia Woolf’s Orlando is the extraordinary biography of a young nobleman in the court of Elizabeth I who transforms into a woman and lives for over three centuries. In his youth, Orlando is a passionate lover and poet. He dotes on the Queen, serves King James faithfully, falls deeply in love with a Russian princess, and becomes an ambassador to Constantinople, but at his heart all Orlando ever wants to be is a great writer (and living at the same time as Marlowe, Donne, and Shakespeare, this is no easy thing). But while living in Constantinople, one evening Orlando is transformed into woman, though she retains all her memories and personality; the only thing that changes about Orlando is her body. Now as a woman, she must navigate complex and exclusionary legal systems throughout the ages, her own previous views on gender, society’s expectations of marriage, and her own ambitions as a poet—not to mention having to grapple with a seemingly immortal lifespan.

An unusual and profound examination of gender roles, expression, and identity, Orlando is one of Woolf’s best known and best loved works, and it remains just as relevant and revolutionary today as when it was first published.

Classics Fiction Fiction - Literary

Virginia Woolf (1882–1941), one of the major literary figures of the twentieth century, transformed the art of the novel. She was a pioneer in the use of stream of consciousness as a narrative device. The author of numerous novels, collections of letters, journals, and short stories, she was also an admired literary critic and a master of the essay form.

Stefan Rudnicki first became involved with audiobooks in 1994. Now a Grammy-winning audiobook producer, he has worked on more than five thousand audiobooks as a narrator, writer, producer, or director. He has narrated more than nine hundred audiobooks. A recipient of multiple AudioFile Earphones Awards, he was presented the coveted Audie Award for solo narration in 2005, 2007, and 2014, and was named one of AudioFile’s Golden Voices in 2012.

Gabrielle de Cuir, award-winning narrator, has narrated over three hundred titles and specializes in fantasy, humor, and titles requiring extensive foreign language and accent skills. She was a cowinner of the Audie Award for best narration in 2011 and a three-time finalist for the Audie and has garnered six AudioFile Earphones Awards. Her “velvet touch” as an actor’s director has earned her a special place in the audiobook world as the foremost producer for bestselling authors and celebrities.