Orlando is dedicated to Vita Sackville-West, poet and garden designer, who had passionate relationships with men and women, including Woolf. It envisages a central character reminiscent of Sackville-West who lives for over three centuries, once changing physical sex from male to female, but then repeatedly altering her outward gender in dress and behaviour. The novel has famously been described as the ‘the longest and most charming love letter in literature’ but outside of its reflection of the author’s personal life, it is perhaps above all for Woolf a rather uncharacteristically riotous celebration of the fluidity of sex, sexuality and gender.