Orlando was written in 1928 as the most ardent declaration of love ever put to paper—"the longest love letter in history," as the son of Vita Sackville-West called it. Sackville-West was the poet and extraordinary gardener to whom Virginia Woolf dedicated this novel and with whom she had, for an incandescent period, an affair.

At the heart of the narrative are the dizzying adventures of Orlando, a young and melancholic Elizabethan courtier, destined to traverse almost four centuries of history without aging—instead changing lives, eras, and selves. In Istanbul, after seven days of uninterrupted sleep, Orlando awakens as a woman. Joining a caravan of gypsies, she returns to London and experiences the mists of the Augustan age, the romantic fervor, up to the dawn of the twentieth century—always in search of true love and the secret meaning of poetry.

A social satire and a hymn to freedom, Orlando is also a meditation on time, identity, and desire. A book that never ends because it changes with the reader.

This Macmillan Collectors Library edition—hardback, elegant, designed to last—is the format such a work deserves. Text in English.