Flâneuse

Street Haunting’, it imagines a freedom for women on the streets of the city to come and go as they please, on foot.

‘Eleanor and Milly and Delia could not possibly go for a walk alone – save in the streets round about Abercorn Terrace, and then only between the hours of eight-thirty and sunset.’

‘Eleanor and Milly and Delia could not possibly go for a walk alone – save in the streets round about Abercorn Terrace, and then only between the hours of eight-thirty and sunset.’

cious reasoning is an ironic invocation of the mythical feminine as dark and irrational, the castrating darkness of the feminine a place from which travellers may not emerge

But, Woolf asks, if she had, what would a woman’s epic or a woman’s poetic tragedy in five acts look like?

But just as important as what she sees is what the walk does to her sense of self.

once we were the objects of the gaze, as street haunters we become observing entities, de-sexed, un-gendered. We cloak ourselves in anonymity, and become as incomprehensible to the city as it often is to us.

Nowadays I’m often overcome by London; even think of the dead who have walked in the city … The view of the grey white spires from Hungerford Bridge brings it to me: & yet I can’t say what ‘it’ is.

London. Defiant – almost gay, clasping her dog as if for warmth

An old beggar woman, blind, sat against a stone wall in Kingsway holding a brown mongrel in her arms & sang aloud.