Is Virginia Woolf's Orlando:A Biography a novel or a biography?

[minamina]

Is Virginia Woolf's Orlando:A Biography a novel or a biography?

[minamina]

Is it such a hard question that nobody answers??????
pls just give ur ideas, whatever it is, welcome

[JCamilo]

Mina, what do you mean by "a biography"? The non-fiction genre? Otherwise, it is irrelevant, a work can be both.

[minamina]

Mina, what do you mean by "a biography"? The non-fiction genre? Otherwise, it is irrelevant, a work can be both.

Which genre is dominating through Orlando ? novel or biography? or we can ask this way: fiction or non-fiction
Orlando is called by most critics a fictional biography not a biographical novel !

[JCamilo]

I do not know how they call it, just that it is a novel that works as biography. They do not exclude each other to prevail over each other.

[orlando58]

I'd say biographical fiction. She had fallen in love with Vita Sackville-West and, at the time Woolf began "Orlando", Vita's romantic interest had shifted heavily toward Mary Garman Campbell. VW knew the best way to Vita's heart was through (a) her writing and (b) linking her with Knole forever, and this is what she carried off in the book. Vita was thunderstruck when she read it and wrote Virginia one of the loveliest letters I've ever come across. I don't have the letter handy, but it is in an appendix to volume 3 of Woolf's letters and definitely worth finding. I believe it was Vita's son, Nigel Nicolson, who labelled it "the longest love-letter in all literature." Vita's mother, on the other hand, was horrified. There are a few wonderful photographs of Vita in the novel.