'The true length of a person's life, whatever the Dictionary of National Biography may say, is always a matter of dispute.’ That’s Virginia Woolf’s surreal premise of her novel Orlando, about an androgynous Tudor nobleman who lives through several centuries without ageing, and ends up in 1928, the year this fantastical ‘biography’ was written. It was inspired by the family history of Woolf’s lover, Vita Sackville-West, brought up at Knole, Kent, and later to revitalise Sissinghurst with her husband, Harold Nicolson. Stories about time travel are always entertaining. What makes Woolf’s yarn so fashionable is the ambiguous sexuality of its hero – or heroine. On his/her journey through the ages, Orlando falls in and out of love (and in and out of bed) with a bewildering variety of suitors, and even changes gender – becoming magically transformed from a man into a woman. ‘Gender fluidity’ is a terribly hot topic...
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