Rating: 
Summary: One of Woolf's more entertaining novels
Review: _Orlando_ is Virginia Woolf's mock biography of her friend Vita Sackville-West. It follows the title character through English history from the Elizabethan Age to the 1920s, when the novel was written. The writing is different sections of the book mimics the styles of different periods of English literature. Most of the book is firmly tongue-in-cheek (Woolf can be very funny), but it does brush lightly upon issues of art, gender, and history.I think _Orlando_ is the most purely entertaining of Woolf's novels. Orlando's various adventures are highly laughable, and Woolf's dry commentary rarely fails to elicit a smile. It is also one of Woolf's less experimental and ambitious novels. She wrote this novel as a lark, for amusement--it is a very different project from, for example, _The Waves_. This is not to say this is in any way a conventional novel--but it is rather different from Woolf's other works of the 1920s. I would definitely recommend this to most readers--it is more accessible to the general reader than Woolf's other novels. Readers familiar with the history of English literature will find it particularly amusing. If you are a first-time Woolf reader looking to really experience her more important works, however, I would suggest _Mrs. Dalloway_ or _To the Lighthouse_ first.
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