2023-07-16 05:00:11
On March 28, 1941, Virginia Woolf undertook her last trip to the River Ouse, from which she did not return. It was, contrary to the previous ones, a trip with no return, that’s why she did it alone and in solitude, far from the charm of those others.
Before that last trip Virginia made many others; She did it from a young age when she began to visit different places in the English countryside, which she adored, and soon to the Mediterranean countries: Spain, Greece, Italy… It was in these countries that Virginia found hospitality, a virtue that she appreciated and could not find in England. Travel has always had a great influence on Virginia Woolf’s literature, as can be seen in many of her articles or in works such as To the Lighthouse and The Waves.
Now the publishing house Nórdica Libros publishes ‘De viaje’, a compilation of the texts that she wrote when she was traveling, with previously unpublished material in Spanish. As Patricia Díaz well points out in the introduction, Virginia Woolf was never a travel writer, but rather a writer who liked to travel, enjoying observing and feeling everything different from what we are used to. When she traveled, everything she saw she wrote down in her diary. Here we can read what Virginia wrote when she traveled.
There is a first part that covers the period from 1887 to 1912, the year in which he married. The second, starts with her letters during her honeymoon. Thus we will read an adolescent Virginia – still with her last name Stephen – who begins her apprenticeship as a writer, to the mature writer who made her last trip while she was alive in 1938.
She never wanted or thought that her diary and private letters would ever be published, so she writes at the dictation of the moment, in an intimate and personal way. While in her diaries we find a more poetic and entertaining style, especially when describing landscapes or monuments, the letters have a different tone, light and adapted to the person to whom she is addressed. She logically did not adopt the same tone when she wrote to Vita Sackville-West, with whom she had a love affair, as when she did to her old Boombury group friends like Molly Mac Carthy, Roger Fry or Lytton Strachey. .
She was an enthusiastic and courageous traveler who enjoyed not only the vision of landscapes and monuments, but above all the observation of people. Her observations about the people she comes across are sharp, to the point, and wrapped in that writer’s impartiality that she observes people from a distance. However, she was not a great traveler. Her radius of action was Great Britain and southern Europe, with Constantinople as the furthest point. She did not visit other continents, like America or Africa.
Greece was undoubtedly his most desired landscape. He visited her twice, first when she was single and years later with her husband. She was fascinated by the whole classical world of her, but she also knew how to enjoy, like nowhere else, its landscapes, its climate and its inhabitants.
Woolf visited Spain on three occasions, each time for different reasons. Her first visit was in April 1905, with her brother Adrian hers. They went to Seville and Granada. Seville is “a very attractive place” but without enthusiasm. She admires the beauty of the cathedral, but does not say much to her “elephantic beauty”; she strolls through the gardens “which are charming, if a little dull and neglected”; the Alcázar does not “seduce” him. In Granada she stays at the Washington Irving. In the morning she admires the gardens, “warm and fragrant, on little terraces like an Italian garden”; in the afternoon she tours the Alhambra “a beautiful Moorish palace” and at night, in a courtyard of the Alhambra, they go to see “the dance of the gypsies.”
When in August 1912 she married Leonard Woolf, they spent their honeymoon visiting Spain, Italy. Just two mentions of the trip in letters to Lytton Strachey and Katherine Cox. «We go from city to city, we investigate the streets, the rivers and the markets, at night we wander the avenues until we find a place to drink something. We have visited ten cities since we started; they are becoming more noticeable and colorful.”
The last trip to Spain was in 1923. From Marseille the writer and her husband visited Madrid, Andalusia, Murcia, and Alicante.
Except for some specific places, such as the Acropolis and the Parthenon, about which she commented on their fascinating beauty, Virginia was very concise in her comments about the places and cities she visited. She did not indulge in descriptions, perhaps because she looked at everything with English skepticism and without the ecstasy that accompanies the gaze of other travelers. Also, certainly, because she saved the best of her creative mind for her novels and stories. Her general vision of what she saw and felt in that tourist way of traveling was very critical, despite being part of it. And this, we think, is how people in our culture spend their holidays. Vice, boredom and a sinister exterior », she pointed out in her diary after visiting the Monte Carlo casino.
Travel
Virginia Woolf
Editorial: Nordic Translation: Patricia Diaz Pereda Precio: 22,50€
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