In praise of the flâneuse …

… A tribute to female flâneurs: the women who reclaimed our city streets | Cities | The Guardian. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

The very first words spoken by Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway say it all: “‘I love walking in London,’ said Mrs Dalloway. ‘Really, it’s better than walking in the country.’” Mrs Dalloway is the flâneuse incarnate, as indicated by her surname: “a woman who likes to dally along the way,” as Rachel Bowlby pointed out. Woolf used the streets as research. What she saw there prompted her to wonder about people and their lives. The trick of capturing what they feel pushed her forward in her literary project – how to represent “life itself” on the page.