Virginia Woolf wasn't always the radical we imagine today. Before the debates on truth and beauty with her circle of early-20th-century artists, intellectuals and writers known as the Bloomsbury Group, before the feminist lectures at Cambridge, and before the ever-constant push to experiment with new forms of fiction, there was the impressionable young girl, Adeline Virginia Stephen, who spent her summers in Cornwall, on England's rugged south-western tip.

Late last year, I found myself on the Great Western Railway, rolling along the same route this modernist literary pioneer would have taken about a century before, the train hugging tight past a progression of wide swathes of golden sand and sloping cliffs, with the deep blue of St Ives Bay and the Godrevy Lighthouse in the distance.