Nobody was ever less of a travel writer than Virginia Woolf,’ Jan Morris writes in her introduction to Travels with Virginia Woolf. ‘She was really unbreakably loyal to England’, she dreaded becoming ‘that perennially grim figure – the travel bore’ and her distaste for going about among ‘ordinary people’ at times amounted to an almost Swiftian misanthropy. Woolfs travel writing seems, therefore, a quirky choice of raw material to form the substance of a travel book. But Jan Morris has carried out her task thoroughly, gathering together everything Virginia Woolf ever wrote about places in her diaries and letters and a few travel essays, arranging the writings chronologically and then doggedly following in her footsteps, tracking down guesthouses and pensiones, churches and views, and adding her own comments and impressions.

In this way we get both women’s, often very different, descriptions. Different not just because time and progress have wrought so many changes on the places (nearly always for the worse) but because, one being a travel writer and one being a writer of another kind, Jan Morris and Virginia Woolf have quite separate outlooks. Woolf records odd slants of light, the contours of bills, rather desultory conversations with peasants and great shudders of horror when confronted by anything unpleasant. She was not interested in accuracy of detail or a thorough overview; all her experiences are written about in an intensely personal way. But Morris’s commentary provides an excellent counterbalance to Woolfs emotional responses and lapses in observation. Morris’s tone is one of slightly baffled respect, every now and again slipping into that of mild surprise at her subject’s ability to ignore the obvious. On a church visit to Assisi Woolf writes: ‘When we had inspected the church we wandered through the streets.’ Morris is not going to let her get away with that. ‘By ‘the church’ I take it Virginia means the double church in the convent of St Francis,’ she writes, ‘with its twenty-eight marvellous frescoes by Giotto and his pupils – not often so summarily dismissed.’ So reading this book is like travelling with two amusing, learned, but at times rather dippy chroniclers, as if one were continually saying to the other ‘No, my dear, I can’t quite agree with you there…’

The book is divided into two parts, Home and Away. ‘Home was always England’, Morris writes, but despite her great love for England Woolf never allowed fondness to cloud her judgement or temper her criticisms. One of the delights of this book is her fierce distress when confronted with anything ugly, more usually people than places. In 1919 she writes in a letter to Ottoline Morrell, ‘London is at the moment more repulsive than I can remember. People have grown much more numerous and much uglier…’; Bristol is ‘the most hideous of all towns’; some women eating in a Stratford teashop are ‘fat white slugs’; and after walking on Hampstead Heath she writes, ‘Our verdict was that the crowd at close quarters is detestable; it smells; it sticks; it has neither vitality nor colour. It is a tepid mass of flesh scarcely organised into human life… How passively and brutishly they lie on the grass! How little of pleasure and pain is in them!’ Woolf would have more reasons for pessimism now, for as Morris records, many of the lonely isolated places she loved have been wrecked. People really are ‘much more numerous and much uglier’ these days, and the rural idylls she describes have been violated by motorways and factories. Fenlands have been drained and the windmills have gone, the ‘lonely and beautiful’ around Land’s End is now a theme park, the view from Carbis Bay is of towering oil rigs, and the streamlets and fields with cows in them have long disappeared from Golders Green.

Away was never very long – seven weeks was the longest trip Woolf made – nor was it all that far. Apart from one journey to Turkey her trips were conventional forays into European culture. France, Italy and Greece were her favourite countries and, Morris writes, ‘her ecstasy was balanced by homesickness’. But there was at least ecstasy – great joy from the beauty of different light, from eating grapes in a Greek vineyard, warmed through from the sun, from slow, first-class-carriage train journeys through France, from unintelligible but enthusiastic parlays with native peasants, and, one afternoon in Greece, most astonishing of all, ‘the great joy of smelling a dead horse in a field’. ‘I cannot admit that when I undertook the work I was among Virginia Woolfs greatest admirers,’ Jan Morris writes in her envoi. ‘In the course of the task, however, I found my attitude reversed…and I unearthed, beneath the public image, a personality I grew truly fond of.’ The reader too, I think, will find that their ideas about Virginia Woolf will change on reading this book, for we see here an altogether more approachable character than the one we have been used to from her collected diaries and letters. This is partly because Virginia Woolf was never depressed when travelling and these writings are not haunted by the spells of melancholia which eventually overcame her. At times snobbish, at times gifted with the insight of an angel and then again quite often grossly mistaken, these writings show Virginia Woolf at her best, but, more importantly, they show her at her worst and most endearing.