More than sixty years after Virginia Woolf drowned in 1941, Olivia Lang (b. 1977), an English writer and critic, walked the entire length of the River Ouse in Sussex, from its source to Seaford, where the river empties in the sea. The result of this journey is an in-depth exploration of how history lives on in the landscape and how ghosts never leave the places they love. From the brutal Barons' War in the 13th century to the 'dinosaur hunters' of the 19th century, Lang brings up stories from the marshy banks of the Ouse, recalling Shakespeare, Homer, Iris Murdoch and Kenneth Grahame, author of the coastal classic The Wind in the Willows, and considers the role of rivers in human life, tracing their intricate flow in literature and mythology. But the central of all the ghosts remains Virginia Woolf, Lang's constant companion on this journey, so the book can also be read as a biography of this unique English writer: a monument to the fluidity of her life and literary process - “after all, despite the sad ending, she seemed, like scuba divers , has the gift of seeing what is hidden under the surface.”