Virginia Woolf Greatest Novels Collection: Orlando, To the Lighthouse, Mrs Dalloway

Orlando is a fantastical biography as well as a funny, exuberant romp through history that examines the true nature of sexuality.

As a teenage boy, the handsome Orlando serves as a page at the Elizabethan court and becomes the favourite of the elderly queen. After Elizabeth's death, he falls deeply in love with Sasha, an elusive and somewhat feral princess in the entourage of the Russian embassy.

Virginia Woolf's Orlando 'The longest and most charming love letter in literature', playfully constructs the figure of Orlando as the fictional embodiment of Woolf's close friend and lover, Vita Sackville-West. At the midpoint of the novel, Orlando, now an ambassador in Constantinople, awakes to find that he is now a woman.

The book describes the adventures of a poet who changes sex from man to woman and lives for centuries, meeting the key figures of English literary history. Considered a feminist classic, the book has been written about extensively by scholars of women's writing and gender and transgender studies.

To the Lighthouse is set on a Hebridean island, overlooked by a distant lighthouse, where Mrs. and Mr. Ramsay with eight children and assorted guests are enjoying the long summer. Mr. Ramsay is a tragic and self-pitying philosopher whose mind is rational but rather cold. Mrs. Ramsay is a beautiful, warm, creative and intuitive woman, the centre of the household. The novel focuses on the conflict arising from young James Ramsay's desire to visit the lighthouse and his father's quenching of this hope. But the summer ends, war and death bring changes. The next journey to the lighthouse is a very different one.

Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf is an incisive portrayal of a single day in the life of 51-year-old Clarissa Dalloway, the perfect high-society hostess, in post-World War I, England. As she prepares to host a party in the evening, she is flooded with memories of her youth in the countryside in Bourton, her choice of Richard Dalloway as husband over the intriguing and demanding Peter Walsh, amidst myriads of other things. A visit from Peter that morning reinforces Mrs Dalloway's pressing need to re-examine the trajectory that her internal and external lives have taken between the pull and push of the past and present, within a certain social structure.