Book description
To the River is the story of the Ouse, the Sussex river in which
Virginia Woolf drowned in 1941. One midsummer week over sixty years
later, Olivia Laing walked Woolf's river from source to sea. The result
is a passionate investigation into how history resides in a landscape -
and how ghosts never quite leave the places they love. Along the way,
Laing explores the roles rivers play in human lives, tracing their
intricate flow through literature and mythology alike. To the River
excavates all sorts of stories from the Ouse's marshy banks, from the
brutal Barons' War of the thirteenth century to the 'Dinosaur Hunters',
the nineteenth-century amateur naturalists who first cracked the fossil
code. Central among these ghosts is, of course, Virginia Woolf herself:
her life, her writing and her watery death. Woolf is the most constant
companion on Laing's journey, and To the River can be read in part as a
biography of this extraordinary English writer, refracted back through
the river she loved. But other writers float through these pages too -
among them Iris Murdoch, Shakespeare, Homer and Kenneth Grahame, author
of the riverside classic The Wind in the Willows. The result is a
wonderfully discursive read - which interweaves biography, history,
nature writing and memoir, driven by Laing's deep understanding of
science and cultural history. It's a beautiful, lyrical work that marks
the arrival of a major new writer.
