Frances Wilson

Stepping Out

Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice and London

By

Chatto & Windus 317pp £16.99 order from our bookshop

It doesn’t take much for a woman to be subversive, says Lauren Elkin: ‘Just walk out your front door.’ Female pedestrians are dangerous: the evidence is everywhere. Remember in Pride and Prejudice the appalled response of Miss Bingley to the arrival at Netherfield of Elizabeth Bennet, who had waded through mud in order to see Jane? Or the astonishment of Walter Hartright, in Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White, at the sight of Anne Catherick wandering around Hampstead Heath at midnight?

If setting foot in a field can turn the world upside down, what happens when women pound the pavements? The answer, Lauren Elkin concludes, is not enough. ‘Space’, she argues, ‘is a feminist issue’ and women should inhabit more of it: ‘Beware fixity. Beware the creeping feeling that you belong. Embrace flow, impurity, fusion.’

Sign Up to our newsletter

Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.

Follow Literary Review on Twitter

  • Last Tweets

    • 'Moser’s book offers such a gripping account of a profoundly damaged human being, trapped in a cycle of repetition,… ,
    • 'Ideas that I’d thought were set down in full continue to smoulder ... this book is only a snapshot of some larger… ,
    • 'Full of invention which, at its most pedestrian, is eminently Victorian, and at its most unrestrained wildly imagi… ,
    • 'What in other hands could have been a dry, pedantic account of Christianity’s birth and evolution becomes in Holla… ,
    • RT : One of my favourite literary magazines is celebrating 40 years this year. Here is the September edition of… ,
    • 'Now that the Thames is too fast-flowing to freeze, its spirit’s devotees ... have found other climes for their pri… ,
    • 'Bythell glowers past his till at a world in slow free fall.' on the travails of a second-hand book… ,
    Follow Us