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This edition has a wonderful essay by Jeanette Winterson that was published in in February 2013 and reproduced in the theatre programme for Neil Bartlett's 2022 stage adaptation, starring Emma Corrin.

Winterson's preface

Winterson explains the backstory of Woolf's love of Vita Sackville-West, her resistance to gender roles, and the playful boldness of writing a novel as though it were a biography, while also being about a real person, but without the constraints of time. It chimes with Winterson's constant exploration of reinvention, shapeshifting, twisting time, railing against boundaries and binaries.
"Orlando, written as a romp, a love-letter, a gay book in every sense of the word, turned out to be the engine of serious though, and an exploding freedom in her style."

Winterson points out this was published the same year as The Well of Loneliness, but whereas that was banned, Woolf "got away with all this", perhaps in part because of the sheer exhilaration of the writing.

"Orlando refuses all constraints: historical, fantastical, metaphysical, sociological. Ageing is irrelevant. Gender is irrelevant. Time is irrelevant. It is as though we could live as we always wanted to; no disappointments, difficulties, sorrow, love, children, lovers, nothing to be avoided, everything to be claimed. Not locked. Not limited. Ecstasy."

See also Winterson's novelistic riff on Orlando, The Powerbook, which I reviewed HERE.

The novel itself

My review is HERE.

The stage adaptation

Corrin was perfect for the role, not just because they're non-binary gender. It was a very post-modern approach, featuring up to nine Virginia Woolfs on stage at any time, knowingly, constantly breaking the fourth wall, and thus with more overt humour than the novel. A friend felt it too reminiscent of pantomime. I didn't think so, and I dislike panto. The plot was massively cut down and thus simplified, but it probably needed to be to make it work on stage.


Image: Emma Corrin as Orlando, with three Woolfs behind ()