To the River: A Journey Beneath the Surface

"She’s such a fantastic writer. She is a proper intellectual, and you can see that in her trajectory. I find her first book more accessible than what she’s written since. I loved her descriptions of the natural world, and I think a lot of people wanted her to be a nature writer. But that’s not the path that she’s chosen, and why should she? There’s a scene in particular, where she describes a cloud of pollen that she can see, and she can see it moving towards her. It’s like this spectre, a heat-induced spectre, coming towards her. I’ve never forgotten that scene. She writes about Virginia Woolf , and her own recovery from heartbreak. There’s a wonderful feeling of being a woman out in the world, out walking, which is something that I do, and I wish more women did. I understand when I hear women say, I don’t dare, or I’d be too frightened, but it saddens me the way that we edit ourselves out of the world. The way we lock ourselves indoors, or allow ourselves to be locked indoors, where, you know, statistically we are most at risk. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . To read about a woman just out by herself, walking in the day and staying in pubs at night, was just really inspiring. And I ended up doing that when I was writing At Hawthorn Time , I walked up the A5 for four days and three nights. It was fantastic, but I felt incredibly self-conscious and out of place. It was hard in all sorts of ways I hadn’t expected, but I don’t know if I would have done it if I hadn’t read To the River . Yes, in that way really good writers can do. It’s not just about Virginia Woolf. It’s not just about the river. It’s about what it is to be human."