Frances Wilson
Stepping Out
Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice and London
By Lauren Elkin
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.’
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