ORLANDO: A BIOGRAPHY - ILLUSTRATIONS, BLACK AND WHITE

In March 1927, Virginia Woolf correcting the proofs of The Walk at the lighthouse, in the exhaustion where the completion of each of its great achievements leaves her novels, notes in her diary the idea of ​​a new book: she is thinking of a " time telescoped like a kind of luminous channel through which my heroine should have the freedom to move at will." She adds that the vein satirical will be dominant: it will be a novel in the style of Daniel Defoe, where she will mock his own lyricism. It will be Orlando, the imaginary biography of a character whose many features are borrowed from Vita Sackville-West (at to which she has been linked for more than a year) and who, alternately man and woman, crosses several centuries of the history of England and who wishes obtain glory, not by his deeds, but by his writings. The book will know a unprecedented success. Writer and biographer Peter Ackroyd perfectly describes the reasons for this success: "One of the great themes of the novel lies in the Orlando's transsexuality. Since Ovid's Metamorphoses, there has always been a current in Western literature fascinated by this singular type of transformation which represents the pure pleasure of invention, and of change, as if the act of writing itself were a form of liberation. There is a deep truth: “in every human being there takes place a kind of vacillation of a sex to the other,” Woolf writes. But, for the writer, such a change is also a deep source of energy. That is why Orlando is a tour de force of a incredible intellectual vivacity, where gaiety and a whimsical inventiveness show what she herself said about it: these are indeed the “holidays of a writer”. We feel how, as she writes, the pressure eases that her thoughts exerted on her. The sentences seem almost in love with their own audacity; they surge forward and, in their artifice, create all pieces a world that is reminiscent of a splendid tapestry in which the characters evolve." This edition reproduces, with the beautiful preface from the translator, the original edition of Charles Mauron's translation published in 1931. Having become untraceable, it is nonetheless the only one that was read and approved by Virginia Woolf, who had become friends with the translator. Our edition is also the first in French to respect Virginia's wish. Woolf presents her book as a biography. It includes photographs : all the illustrations from the original Hogarth Press edition are here reproduced, mixing archival documents and personal photographs of Vita or even Angelica Bell, enhanced with a few strokes of paint by her mother Vanessa Bell, Virginia's sister. The index is due to Virginia Woolf herself, who completes the illusion of academic work, is here translated for the first time times.