Woolf's understanding of her position within the whole of natural existence was often expressed within the context of being a walker upon the earth, of being, as she describes in Mrs. Dalloway (1925), part of the “swing, tramp, and trudge” of human existence (4). Her travels between the city and the country as well as her voyages outside of her native England reinforced within her a view of human experience as a simultaneous inclusion in—and alienation from—the strangeness of the natural universe. One locus in particular, Cornwall, served as a privileged site of Woolf's psychic and aesthetic mining of the natural world. Cornwall was for Woolf the place of an imagined stability associated with childhood and the acute discovery of a radical abandonment. As Woolf herself identified in “A Sketch of the Past” (written in 1940, only months before her own death), her earliest memories reached back—through her mother—to Talland House in St. Ives, Cornwall (MOB 64–65), which Leslie Stephen had leased in 1881, and where the Stephens spent their summer holidays from 1882, the year Virginia was born, until 1894, the summer before the death of her mother, Julia Stephen, in 1895, when Virginia was thirteen.

Cornwall was not simply a “framing device” for Woolf's art; rather its place in Woolf's writing anticipates Lawrence Buell's description of an environmental text as one in which “the non–human environment becomes a presence that begins to suggest that human history is implicated in natural history” (qtd. in McKusick 200). To put it another way, the visit to Cornwall in 1905 was for Woolf the genesis of a realization that would come to full expression twenty years later in To the Lighthouse (1927), namely that seemingly stable constructions such as family, home and solid land are somewhat fl imsy illusions of stability. Walks along the towering Cornish cliff s, with their history of often unregarded devastation, inspired in Virginia what might be called a “geological view” of human history—not unlike that of an Arnold or Hardy, except that in Woolf's case the “long view” was infl ected not so much with Victorian doubt as with a chastened perception of a self decentered in the vast reaches of natural history.