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. Rebecca Solnit, The Solitary Stroller and The City, Wanderlust: A History of Walking (Penguin: 2001) In Virginia Woolf’s “Street Haunting”, the reader follows Woolf through a winter’s walk through London under the false pretense to buy a new pencil. During her journey through the streets of London, she is made aware of a number of strangers. The nature of her walk is altered by these strangers she encounters. Street Haunting comes to profound conclusions about the fluidity of individuality when interacting with other people. Woolf is enabled by the presence of others to subvert her individuality. Instead of reflecting directly onto herself, she uses the people she interacts with as a proxy for her own feelings and opinions. In doing so, Woolf empathizes with the people while engaging in a cold deconstruction of her surroundings, making the …show more content…

Woolf begins "Street Haunting" by positing that sometimes we can say we need to buy a pencil as an excuse for wandering the streets of London. According to Woolf, the best time to travel through the city is during the evening in winter. Once outside, people are able to shed the contents of the self and all the memories associated with the individual. On the street and outside the home, "all that vanishes" (3), and we can travel through London as a detached entity that does not look at anything too deeply. We can admire the bustling life around us as long as we do not stop to contemplate the individuals who compose it. If we start to speculate about the personal lives of those we encounter, "we are in danger of diffing deeper than the eye approves" (5). Instead, Woolf argues, we must obey the eye instead of the mind, though it is inevitable that we will fall into contemplation eventually, asking questions like, "what is it like to be a dwarf?" (6). Circumstances compel unity; for convenience’ sake a man must be a whole. The good citizen when he opens his door in the evening must be banker, golfer, husband, father; not a nomad wandering the desert, a mystic staring at the sky, a debauchee in the slums of San Francisco, a soldier heading a revolution, a pariah howling with scepticism and solitude. When he opens his door, he must run his fingers through his hair and put his umbrella in the stand like the rest" 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." The number of books in the world is “infinite,” just like the stories overheard from other streetwalkers. Woolf remarks how a passerby may catch a word and never hear the rest of the story. City pedestrians must obey the flow of foot traffic. Two men share the latest “wire” from the news, and she wonders if they are hoping to catch good fortune with this information. Woolf watches the flow of walkers across the Strand and the Waterloo Bridge onto trains, where she imagines they’ll travel to some “prim little villa” on the outskirts of London.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) 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).

Nigerian-American writer Teju Cole’s debut novel, Open City is about many things—identity, dislocation, history, and love. But first, it is about a solitary walker setting out from his home in Morningside Heights and learning the city at his feet. While the narrator, a Nigerian doctor doing his residency, wanders the streets of New York, he reflects on his recent breakup with his girlfriend and encounters a string of local immigrants who enrich and complicate his portrait of the city and himself. For Open City, the term “street haunting” is perhaps particularly apt; this post-colonial look at New York City reflects the unique loneliness that stems from isolation in the midst of a crowd. Street Haunting: A London Adventure” is an essay written by Virginia Woolf, first published in 1927. In this essay, Woolf explores the theme of urban solitude and the subjective experience of wandering through the streets of London. is reviewed between 08.30 to 16.30 Monday to Friday. We're experiencing a high volume of enquiries so it may take usOr 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. 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. Baudelaire, Charles, and Jonathan Mayne. The Painter of Modern Life, and Other Essays. London: Phaidon, 1964.

alter the current scale of values, and will see in it not merely a difference of view, but a view that is weak, or trivial, or sentimental, because it differs from his own.” On Being Ill” is another one of my favorite, it made me pause a lot to think about what Woolf was saying - and it was truly special. I loved some bits so much I had to stop to read them aloud multiple times to my boyfriend lol. Highly, highly recommend!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. This was my first time ever reading Virginia Woolf, and it will for sure not be my last! I am somewhat at a loss of words upon finishing Street Haunting, and will probably end up quoting half of the book in my efforts to review it - the gorgeous writing speaks better for itself than I ever could. And finally, “Street Haunting”. This story was an absolute delight. More than that, it was probably the first time I saw myself so much in a book. The very opening of this makes me convinced Virginia Woolf can see in my brain. Our first short story comes in the form of Solid Objects, about a man who forfeits political ambition to focus on an unusual collection of - literally - rubbish. This is my second favorite entry, and I love the symbolism of a protagonist who trades something physically intangible that seems concrete to others (status/career) for something solid but intangible to others (a collection of physical objects).

Fig. 2 - Virginia Woolf is walking in bustling London on a winter evening while various thoughts run through her head. Street Haunting" is a collection of six stories by Virginia Woolf selected and published by Penguin Books in 2005 to celebrate their 70th birthday.

Street Haunting: A London Adventure” is not a conventional narrative with a clear plot or conclusion. Instead, it is a lyrical exploration of the sensory and psychological dimensions of urban life. Woolf’s prose style is rich and introspective, blending fiction and non-fiction elements to create a contemplative and atmospheric piece of writing. Street Haunting Essay Summary By Virginia Woolf-Throughout the essay, Woolf interweaves personal reflections and philosophical musings. She contemplates the nature of reality and the complexity of human perception, emphasizing the subjectivity of experience. She also reflects on the role of gender in public spaces, touching on the restrictions placed on women’s movements and the liberating aspects of anonymity in the city. Street Haunting Essay Summary By Virginia Woolf-One of Woolf’s most celebrated works, “Mrs. Dalloway,” was published in 1925. The novel takes place over the course of a single day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway, an upper-class woman in post-World War I London. I feel certain I am going mad again. I feel we can't go through another one of those terrible times. And I shan't recover this time. I begin to hear voices and I can't concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to do. You have given me the greatest possible happiness. You have been in every way all that anyone could be. I don't think two people could have been happier till this terrible disease came. I can't fight any longer. I know that I am spoiling your life, that without me you could work. And you will I know. You see I can't even write this properly. I can't read. What I want to say is I owe all the happiness of my life to you. You have been entirely patient with me and incredibly good. I want to say that – everybody knows it. If anybody could have saved me it would have been you. Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness. I can't go on spoiling your life any longer.