Richard Dalloway is aboard the Euphrosyne, a cargo boat carrying ‘dry goods to the Amazons’ (VO: 38), when he adds an intriguing insert to a letter his wife is writing:

It is not rare to find Woolf's texts gesturing to the ‘outlandish’, but while the early-twentieth-century idiom tended merely to denote anything strange, uncivilised or exotically foreign, Woolf's usage always points to something more misleading or paradoxical. What and where are ‘these outlandish parts’ that Dalloway refers to? Does he very literally mean that to be at sea is ‘outlandish’? Should we understand that anywhere outside of England is outlandish to the proper Tory traveller, inspiring sententious national complacency? Or is he merely extending his wife's imagery to confirm that outlandishness is the key feature of the whole bunch of eccentric countrymen playing out their roles on board ship? The entire, very perplexing chapter points to all these connotations, as well as many others. Whatever the case, Dalloway's marginalia themselves perform outlandishness by playing with foreign allusions and coded languages – French, Latin, Greek, deflected euphemisms of seduction and gallant niceties of the beau monde – within the epistolary conventions of a letter that may well never reach its destination. Etymology hardly helps to elucidate his meaning. The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary notes that the adjective derives from ‘outland’, a noun now limited to archaic or regional usage, formerly a common word of good English stock designating either outlying lands on feudal domains left for tenants to work, or alien peoples and unknown tongues. Its signifying potential lingers on today in the adjective ‘outlandish’, but its geographical anchorage is all but effaced.