Virginia Woolf dedicated this novel to her eccentric and charismatic friend, Vita Sackville-West, whose Sapphic tendencies intrigued Woolf throughout their friendship. Orlando is an historical fantasy and literary pastiche which parodies, among other texts, SackvilleWest's own The Land (1927).

As in all of Woolf's novels, she creates a radical use of time; some critics have pointed out that Woolf develops her concept from the contemporary writers Henri Bergson and Marcel Proust. Time is simply a measure of the duration of the individual, of the accretion of the past; duration is a function of the invisible progress of the past into the future. Amid this flux and variation which we call the present, one cannot help perceiving past and present as, in a sense, simultaneous or as part of a continuum. The present, even as we experience and perceive it, is part of the past, and...