Woolf wrote evocatively to the painter Duncan Grant that in her account of her trip in 1938 to the Scottish Highlands there was “no room for more” (L6 3409: 27 June), stamping her experience with the inevitable brevity of the postcard she was writing and at the same time suggesting perhaps that the Highlands should remain as they are, that is, relatively empty. Such, I suggest, is the aesthetic need of a Woolf who by 1938 was not the celebrant of urban wandering she was in the carnivalesque and festive “Street Haunting” (1927) or the more uproariously joyful passages through the city of Mrs. Dalloway (1925), such as Elizabeth's breezy bus trip. Woolf's trip to Scotland has gone unremarked in Woolf criticism, and in David Bradshaw's introduction to the Oxford edition of To the Lighthouse (1927), makes no appearance in an otherwise detailed account of all that Scotland might have meant to Woolf. In an effort to link Woolf's representation of Scotland to that novel's purported critique of imperialism, Bradshaw leads readers away from an investigation of how Scotland's empty spaces nurtured the later Woolf's creative imagination. Her insistence on preserving Scotland's emptiness in turn seems to cast the urbanized landscape as rather more problematic and indeed damaging than has recently been acknowledged in Woolf criticism, which has sought to ally the city with a progressive feminist consciousness that rejects the association of “woman” with “nature.” This paper explores Woolf's 1938 journey to Scotland as a confrontation with an aesthetics of emptiness apparently in tension with her struggles (in The Years [1937] for example) to continue valuing the agitations of city life.

Biographers touch briefly on Virginia and Leonard Woolf's driving trip from London to the Isle of Skye between June 16 and July 2, 1938. Herbert Marder, in The Measure of Life, presents it as a vacation from the pressures of receiving reviews of the controversial Three Guineas (1938). Having written a book interpreted as a harsh attack on patriotism in a climate of impending international tension (Hitler invaded Austria in March of that year), Woolf now visited a northern landscape charged with meaning, where she meditated on the conflict between Roman invaders and Scottish marauders while sitting on Hadrian's wall, reading Greek poetry in translation.