Virginia Woolf’s Orlando starts his life as an Elizabethan nobleman who aspires to become a poet. Over the course of a 400 year life, he travels widely, watches the world change around him, takes in changes in literary tastes and conventions, becomes a woman, and eventually lands a publishing contract. Orlando is Woolf’s fantasia on the themes of gender and literature, and offers a vision of the history of English literature. It is an inventive and playful novel about the limits imposed by society on women, the permanence of literature, and the contingency of identity.