Virgina Woolf's novelistic homage to her lover, Vita Sackville-West, traces the adventures of the ever-young Orlando who, defying convention – and biology – lives for 400-plus years, changing sex from man to woman in the course of a turbulent and varied existence. The novel charts his, and later her, travails in the pursuit of love, in the worlds of politics, society, and the law, and in the experiences of death and birth. Starting life male, Orlando becomes female, though she continues to switch identities with a change of costume, and to consort with ladies and archdukes, professors, poets and prostitutes. Constructing this fantastical scenario, Woolf conjures the atmosphere of each historical age, alluding to the complex and changing articulations of class, race, sex and nation and revealing the inequalities between women and men and the differing destinies that befall each sex.

In her film adaptation, director Sally Potter supplements the text with opulent visions of the ornate costumes, and complex rituals and customs of past times. Segmenting the film into ‘chapters’ introduced by a date and a single word descriptor – Death, Love, Poetry, Politics, Society, Sex, Birth – the film traces the adventures of Orlando as he, and then she, partakes of courtly life, politics, the search for love, legal entanglements, war, death and birth. Both the novel and the film comment, with wry humour but also affection, on the rituals, customs and beliefs of English life.