A playful, inventive novel presented as a biography. Orlando is a young nobleman at the court of Elizabeth I, and he lives, remarkably, for several centuries, passing through changing ages of English history and changing in himself along the way. Poetry, love, ambition and identity all appear, and the narrator often comments with gentle mockery on the business of writing a life. Inspired by Woolf's friend Vita Sackville-West, the book is a witty exploration of gender, time and the nature of the self.