Travels with Virginia Woolf

Taking as her guide extracts from Virginia Woolf's diaries and journals, correspondence and rare travel essays, Jan Morris follows her footprints from Sussex and Cornwall to wartime London, Italy and the Riviera to Greek mountains and southern Spain. She intersperses Virginia's verbal sketches of a Greek peasant wedding, a fenland sky, an elderly spinster in a hotel lobby, or Bognor pier in the rain with her own comments on writer and subject. Sometimes Jan Morris enlarges the picture, or adds a "chance glimpse" of her own; or enlightens a householder who had no idea their roof had sheltered a famous guest. The two writers' counterpointed observations conjure the spirit of place, but above all, Jan Morris discovers and shares Virginia Woolf's pleasure and unexpected sense of fun.