An interesting read, but a bit disappointing. But still it's always nice to read Virginia Woolf's prose, and there were several texts I didn't know. She was not a great traveller, so this book - a collection of texts mostly from diaries and letters - is mostly a curio, a small pleasure for her admirers - one of whom I am, of course.
I think what I liked less was the editing - I wouldn't have organised the texts by place, as Jan Morris did, I think the collection would be much more interesting and expressive of her mind and feelings about the places if they were organised chronologically. Jan Morris says in the introduction:
"What one records is really the state of one's own mind." Precisely that is the fascination of these writings. They are seldom descriptions of place, they are records of the effect of place upon a particular sensibility, one of the most finely tuned imaginable. The earliest piece here was written in 1897, when the writer was fifteen, the latest in 1940, when she was fifty-eight, and there is inevitably a vast difference in the style and approach.
And precisely because of that evolution in her style and approach, I believe the book would be more coherent and enjoyable if it followed her impressions along her life, which is also a kind of travel through time that inevitably influences what one gets from travels through space.
That said, I enjoyed it very much, especially the parts about Greece, her description of Epidaurus reminded me so much of my own visit there.
...but if statues & marble are solid to the touch, so, simply, are words resonant to the ear.
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