Book description
Virginia Woolf had a lively sense of place and delighted in `lighting
accidentally. . . upon scenes which would have gone on, have always gone
on, will go on, unrecorded, save for this chance glimpse. Following
Virginia's footprints from her beloved Sussex and Cornwall to wartime
London, Italy and the Riviera to Greek mountains and the wilds of Spain,
Jan Morris intersperses swift verbal sketches of a Greek peasant
wedding, a fenland sky, an elderly spinster in a hotel dining room in
Italy, or Bognor pier in the rain with her own brief, telling comments
on both writer and subject.
Virginia Woolf was born in London in 1882, the daughter of Sir Leslie
Stephen, first editor of the Dictionary of National Biography.
From 1915, when she published her first novel, The Voyage Out,
Virginia Woolf maintained an astonishing output of fiction, literary
criticism, essays and biography. In 1912 she married Leonard Woolf,
and in 1917 they founded the Hogarth Press.
Virginia Woolf suffered a series of mental breakdowns throughout her
life, and on 28 March 1941 she committed suicide.
Jan Morris, who is Anglo-Welsh by parentage, divides her time
between her library-house in North Wales, her dacha in the
Black Mountains of South Wales, and travel abroad. Besides her
acclaimed Pax Britannica trilogy, she has written books on
Wales, Venice, Oxford, Spain, Manhattan, Hong Kong and Sydney,
together with two autobiographical works, seven volumes of collected
travel essays and the fictional Last Letters from Hav, which
was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. She is an Honorary Doctor of
Letters of the University of Wales, and she has recently published a
book about Admiral 'Jacky' Fisher.
