English · Advanced
Read Orlando in Englishwith every sentence explained
Virginia Woolf · 1928
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About the book
Orlando by Virginia Woolf was first published in 1928. In Passage you read the full text in the original English, marked advanced and filed under fantasy, historical fiction and romance. It runs to about 78,400 words.
Born a nobleman under Queen Elizabeth I. Still alive in 1928. And, somewhere along the way, a woman.
Orlando is sixteen, handsome, a would-be poet, and a favourite of the ageing Queen. During the Great Frost, when the Thames freezes solid and London holds a carnival on the ice, he falls wildly in love with Sasha, a mysterious Russian princess. Heartbreak follows, then strange long sleeps, a mission as ambassador to Constantinople, and one morning a transformation that changes everything except who Orlando really is.
The centuries roll by, from Elizabethan London to Victorian gloom to the modern age of motor cars, and Orlando barely ages a day.
Playful, witty and daring, Orlando is Woolf's mock biography written for her friend and lover Vita Sackville-West. It became a famous 1992 film starring Tilda Swinton and is still a landmark story about gender and identity.
- Author
- Virginia Woolf
- First published
- 1928
- Language
- English
- Level
- Advanced
- Genre
- Fantasy, Historical Fiction, Romance
- Length
- About 78,400 words
How it opens
He—for there could be no doubt of his sex, though the fashion of the time did something to disguise it—was in the act of slicing at the head of a Moor which swung from the rafters. It was the colour of an old football, and more or less the shape of one, save for the sunken cheeks and a strand or two of coarse, dry hair, like the hair on a coconut.
Reading Orlando in Passage
Passage sets the book as a quiet, paginated reader in English. Read at your own pace, and when a sentence stops you, tap it. You get:
- a natural translation of that exact sentence,
- a short note on the grammar, in plain words,
- the key words, which you can save with the sentence they came from,
- all of it in English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Turkish or Portuguese, whichever you read best.
It's marked advanced, with richer vocabulary and longer sentences. If it feels heavy, start with an intermediate English book and come back to it. The words you save come back later in short review games, so the book keeps teaching after you close it.
