Orlando (Annotated) (English Edition)
価格： ￥0
カテゴリ： Kindle版
ブランド： Moorside Press
This edition incorporates an original introduction from Moorside Press, including a biography, a critical discussion of Woolf's place in the history of British Literature and a short contextual discussion of the book.
Published by Hogarth Press in 1928, Orlando is at once an oddity, an indulgence, but also a slice of genius. The novel – because despite masquerading as a biography, it is a work of narrative fiction – tells the unlikely, impossible story of Orlando through his years as a male member of the Elizabethan Court, an affair with a Russian Princess, a subdued period of contemplation during the reign of James 1, his time as an ambassador in Constantinople and the sudden transformation into a woman.
Not content with such a plot twist Woolf allows her character to live on through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, using the journey to trace the female place in society while allowing Orlando the freedom to seduce, be seduced and to love in equal measure. After 80,000 words, Woolf leaves her heroine in the England of 1928 having completed a poem, The Oak Tree, that had been started some four centuries earlier.
Orlando has been, and can be, interpreted in a number of ways. On the surface it’s an examination of the places of men and women in society over the centuries and in part also a comment of what it is to be a man and a woman. Yet it’s also a statement of androgyny, opening up with the following sentence: ‘He – for there could be no doubt of his sex, though the fashion of the time did something to disguise it – was in the act at slicing at the head of a moor …’ In some ways, the discussion of the moor’s head that follows is less important than the clause that precedes it.
It has also been described as a love letter to Vita Sackville-West, embodied in the character of Orlando with the segment describing the love affair with the Russian Princess (a character partly drawn from Madame Lopokova, the wife of J.M. Keynes) interpreted as a thinly disguised allegory for Sackville-West's affair with Violet Trefusis.
Published by Hogarth Press in 1928, Orlando is at once an oddity, an indulgence, but also a slice of genius. The novel – because despite masquerading as a biography, it is a work of narrative fiction – tells the unlikely, impossible story of Orlando through his years as a male member of the Elizabethan Court, an affair with a Russian Princess, a subdued period of contemplation during the reign of James 1, his time as an ambassador in Constantinople and the sudden transformation into a woman.
Not content with such a plot twist Woolf allows her character to live on through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, using the journey to trace the female place in society while allowing Orlando the freedom to seduce, be seduced and to love in equal measure. After 80,000 words, Woolf leaves her heroine in the England of 1928 having completed a poem, The Oak Tree, that had been started some four centuries earlier.
Orlando has been, and can be, interpreted in a number of ways. On the surface it’s an examination of the places of men and women in society over the centuries and in part also a comment of what it is to be a man and a woman. Yet it’s also a statement of androgyny, opening up with the following sentence: ‘He – for there could be no doubt of his sex, though the fashion of the time did something to disguise it – was in the act at slicing at the head of a moor …’ In some ways, the discussion of the moor’s head that follows is less important than the clause that precedes it.
It has also been described as a love letter to Vita Sackville-West, embodied in the character of Orlando with the segment describing the love affair with the Russian Princess (a character partly drawn from Madame Lopokova, the wife of J.M. Keynes) interpreted as a thinly disguised allegory for Sackville-West's affair with Violet Trefusis.