Street Haunting: A London Adventure;Including the Essay 'Evening Over Sussex: Reflections in a Motor Car'

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The Library's buildings remain fully open but some services are limited, including access to collection items. We're The narrator explores this imaginative act of dipping in and out of people’s minds as they move through the city’s wintry, twilight streets. Woolf decides that she needs to take an excursion through the streets of London with the pretext of needing a pencil. It’s really just an excuse to escape her room and solitude. The ideal time for a walk in London is in the winter evening. There’s no heat to hide from in the shade, and one can take their time ambling along. By joining the vast multitude of pedestrians, one becomes anonymous. Sam Wiseman, Ecology, Identity and Eschatology: Crossing the Country and the City in Woolf, Contradictory Woolf, ed. D. Ryan, Stella Bolaki (Liverpool University Press: 2012)

Today, we’ve highlighted a few works in the library’s collection, both historical and contemporary that explore this lesser-known image of the flâneur in literature. Why not be transported somewhere new today? This collection is a perfect starting place for the reader who knows she ought to read Woolf but has shied away in awe of Woolf's reputation as "brilliant but difficult." Okay, okay, "A Room of One's Own" is also a great place to start, but that's not the revolutionary stream of consciousness, poetic, haunting, Modernist fiction that she's celebrated for. These stories are. And they are short. And perfect. Her first novel, The Voyage Out, appeared in 1915, and she then worked through the transitional Night and Day (1919) to the highly experimental and impressionistic Jacob's Room (1922). From then on her fiction became a series of brilliant and extraordinarily varied experiments, each one searching for a fresh way of presenting the relationship between individual lives and the forces of society and history. She was particularly concerned with women's experience, not only in her novels but also in her essays and her two books of feminist polemic, A Room of One's Own (1929) and Three Guineas (1938).A short essay about Virginia Woolf walking through the city, and observing the people and buildings around her. She reflects on the nature of the city and the human experience. She muses on the ways in which the city shapes and influences its inhabitants, and how the experiences of one person can be vastly different from those of another, even when living in the same city. Farsi prendere per mano da Virginia Woolf e seguirla - quando si riesce - nel mondo della letteratura, passando da Jane Austen ai problemi derivanti dal leggere gli autori russi in traduzione, imparando Come dobbiamo leggere un libro e riflettendo sullo sviluppo del romanzo negli Stati Uniti, oppure passeggiando per le strade di Londra alla ricerca di una matita e della visione di scorci di vita cittadina, è un piacere enorme. L'acutezza del pensiero e della visione dell'Autrice è fenomenale, e lo stile è magistrale. Purtroppo, ma la colpa è del lettore, non sempre si riesce a seguirla, soprattutto perché non si conoscono gli autori e i testi di cui parla. La stella mancante è imputabile al procurato senso di ignoranza e conseguente imbarazzo. She reflects on a time that she bought a piece of china and how it marked a memory for her in Italy. Items throughout one’s home help record experiences and define a person. This all vanishes once a person leaves their home and joins the masses on the streets. Woolf takes in the sights and sounds of London winter, falling leaves, and palely lit streets. She imagines the life of an office worker, thumbing through papers and answering correspondences.

There are three themes in “Street Haunting”: people watching, escapism, individuality, and urban anonymity. People Watching Tracy Seeley, Virginia Woolf’s “Street Haunting” and the Art of the Digressive Passage, Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction, Vol. 15, No. 1 (Spring 2013), pp. 149-160

In 1904, Woolf’s father died, leaving her and her sister Vanessa with a substantial inheritance. This financial independence allowed Woolf to pursue her passion for writing and engage in the intellectual and artistic circles of the time. Alongside her sister, Woolf became a central figure in the Bloomsbury Group, a collective of artists, writers, and thinkers who sought to challenge traditional conventions and explore new artistic forms. Yet she also allows one possible escape, perhaps predictable for an author and essayist: "But here, none too soon, are the second-hand bookshops. Here we find anchorage in these thwarting currents of being; here we balance ourselves after the splendours and miseries of the streets." Now if someone has ever known me, they (hopefully) know my absolute favorite activity is getting lost walking in the streets. And the way Woolf describes her thought process in this essay is just… ineffable. I am in love !!! Through the use of stream-of-consciousness narrative technique, Woolf provides insights into the thoughts and emotions of her characters, exposing the inner lives that often go unnoticed. “Mrs. Dalloway” is considered a groundbreaking work of modernist literature for its innovative approach to storytelling and its exploration of themes such as identity, time, and the impact of societal norms on individuals.

The next story, Lappin and Lapinova, may be the most traditional/accessible of the collection, but it's also the most subversive. A newlywed has a difficult time adjusting to life as a wife - until she invents a fantasy world for the couple to inhabit. This is a distinctly feminist story with layers of depth, and yet it is also universal and understandable without analysis. It's currently one of my favorite short stories in this or any other collection. A collection of short stories and essays; one of which was the best I HAVE EVER READ : Street haunting. Absolutely stunning. Throughout my reading I didn't stop wondering how someone can reach such literary perfection. I feel like I am slowly immersing myself into Woolf's world and her stream of consciousness style. I also read some scraps of the French translated version that I had within reach -available under the title " Au hasard des rues - Une aventure londonienne "- and I loved the translation. All upcoming public events are going ahead as planned and you can find more information on our events blog Or is the end something rather different? The flâneur – a position in literary history hitherto reserved for men – describes a city-wanderer taken to the streets in search of inspiration. Encountering the shadow of a person who, it transpires, “is ourselves,” and asking the unanswered question “am I here, or am I there?” Woolf constructs an incorporeal, extra-temporal flâneuse who makes not merely a double-journey, but a triple: through space, time and the self.And while in Baudelaire’s day, the flâneur was generally assumed to be white and male, more contemporary works have challenged this preconception. Through some writer’s eyes, the act of observing, and the gaze itself, has taken on a new power and potential. Viewing the flâneur through a feminist or postcolonial lens, street haunting (as Virginia Woolf calls it) raises the questions of who is able to be invisible and unobserved in the modern city and what this capability says about modern society. Baudelaire, Charles, 1821-1867 2006. Ann Arbor: ProQuest. https://www-proquest-com.proxy2.library.illinois.edu/encyclopedias-reference-works/baudelaire-charles-1821-1867/docview/2137915067/se-2?accountid=14553.