To the River
Book description
Over sixty years after Virginia Woolf drowned in the River Ouse, Olivia Laing set out one midsummer morning to walk its banks, from source to sea. Along the way, she explores the roles that rivers play in human lives, tracing their intricate flow through literature, mythology and folklore.
Lyrical and…
Why read it?
1 author picked To the River as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?
When I was young, I wanted to be Virginia Woolf. I read volumes of her letters, so many that the rhythms of her sentences seemed to infect my own mind.
Decades later, I decided I would rather have been her father, Leslie Stephen, author of The Playground of Europe— but only in his mountaineering days, before he succumbed to his now legendary fits of selfishness and pique.
Strangely enough, Olivia Laing manages to channel both father and daughter in her intensely ruminative ramble along the River Ouse, where Virginia drowned herself in 1941.
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