Woolf was born in 1882. She grew up as a Victorian. Gender roles were strictly observed in society and at her London home in Hyde Park Gate. Her brother Thoby went to Cambridge; Virginia and her sister Vanessa were educated at home. The social doctrine they were raised on was that of “separate spheres” – woman in the home, man in the world – and it was still going strong when Woolf published Orlando, in the year that all female British citizens over 21 finally got the vote.

But Woolf believed that the creative mind is androgynous. She was an expert in Elizabethan literature. She loved both the scope and the certainty of the Renaissance mind. Shakespeare, writing his sonnets to boys and women with equal passion, understanding the manliness of a soldier, the intensity of a nun, seemed to her to be a sign of what we all might be – bigger, wider, freed from convention and hypocrisy.

Woolf met Vita Sackville-West in 1922. Sackville-West was an English aristocrat brought up at Knole in Kent. As a woman, she could not inherit the ancestral home. Woolf, who had fallen in love with Sackville-West’s past as much as her person, found that the family portraits, ancient relics and priceless objects that filled Knole filled her imagination. But Orlando is more than a fantasy or a historical novel; it is highly political. Orlando is a savage satire on sexism.

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Orlando, written as a romp, a love letter, a gay book in every sense of the word, turned out to be the engine of an exploding freedom in her style.

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The quality of mind that Woolf (following Coleridge) called “androgyny” is really an adventure of the spirit (think Emily Dickinson).

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Woolf’s wit, her writing, her audacity, smuggled across the borders of propriety the most outrageous contraband.