Woolf’s breakthrough as a novelist came with the publication of her first novel, “The Voyage Out,” in 1915. The novel, inspired by her own experiences traveling to South America, explored themes of self-discovery and the limitations imposed on women in society. It laid the foundation for her subsequent novels, which delved deeper into the complexities of human consciousness and the subjective nature of reality. Rebecca Solnit, The Solitary Stroller and The City, Wanderlust: A History of Walking (Penguin: 2001) From prime ministers to the homeless, the narrator examines the city’s inhabitants and the spaces they occupy. ‘What greater delight and wonder can there be than to leave the straight lines of personality’, the narrator asks, to feel ‘that one is not tethered to a single mind, but can put on briefly for a few minutes the bodies and minds of others’. Woolf doesn’t introduce these people simply for a celebration of their ‘weirdness’. It is a comment that the crowd is a crowd no matter what the social status of the individuals, which has its own influences and need to fit in with each other.

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. 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" The Mark on the Wall also gives an image of the author, this time at home. It reads like a journal entry as she muses idly about the strange round object across the room. At the end of the essay, it's revealed to be a snail...a symbol - like moths, colorful flowers, and mahogany sideboards - that appear in several of the other essays as well.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. Fig. 2 - Virginia Woolf is walking in bustling London on a winter evening while various thoughts run through her head. Woolf delights in the Fantasy of imagining her life as other people. She dives so deeply into the imagined minds of others that it’s not clear to the reader which is fiction and which is reality. When she steps inside the shop for a pencil, she notes that the atmosphere of the room feels like the “distilled” essence of the people who own it. She believes that the two owners have been arguing, but it is at once resolved as she buys a pencil. The story ends and begins with the pencil, with a brief mention in the middle. However, the pencil serves as an excuse for Woolf to escape the confines of her domestic life and go on an adventure in the city streets. Individuality and Urban Anonymity Les grands romans de Virginia Woolf sont des merveilles d'architecture. C'est dans ses nouvelles, ou ce qui en tient lieu, que son art tout particulier de la divagation poétique prend toute la place. C'est le cas, et c'est même le propos de "Street Haunting". Street Haunting Essay Summary By Virginia Woolf-The essay begins with Woolf stating her intention to leave her house and venture out into the city on a winter’s evening. She describes the motivations behind her decision, highlighting the allure of anonymity and the opportunity to observe the lives of others. Woolf argues that going outside and immersing oneself in the city’s atmosphere can stimulate the imagination and provide valuable insights into the human condition.

In his essay, “The Painter of Modern Life,” nineteenth-century French poet and critic, Charles Baudelaire, established his definition of the flâneur, a figure that continues to capture the imagination of writers and artists more than a century later. Literally but imperfectly translated as “stroller” or “idler,” the flâneur is the quintessential observer, the outsider whose meandering path skims along, but does not directly intersect, with the paths of those that surround him or her. In Baudelaire’s eye, the flâneur was inextricably tied with the artist and the poet—the ability to return to one’s home and fashion something immortal out of these passing glimpses of modern city life.

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.” The crowd is his domain, just as the air is the bird’s, and water that of the fish. His passion and his profession is to merge with the crowd. For the perfect idler, for the passionate observer, it becomes an immense source of enjoyment to establish his dwelling in the throng, in the ebb and flow, the bustle, the fleeting and the infinite. To be away from home and yet to feel at home anywhere; to see the world, to be at the very centre of the world, and yet to be unseen of the world, such are some of the minor pleasures of those independent, intense and impartial spirits, who do not lend themselves easily to linguistic definitions.” –Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life, 1863

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. In 1912 Virginia married Leonard Woolf, a writer and social reformer. Three years later, her first novel The Voyage Out was published, followed by Night and Day (1919) and Jacob's Room (1922). Between 1925 and 1931 Virginia Woolf produced what are now regarded as her finest masterpieces, from Mrs Dalloway (1925) to The Waves (1931). She also maintained an astonishing output of literary criticism, short fiction, journalism and biography. On 28 March 1941, a few months before the publication of her final novel, Between the Acts, Virginia Woolf committed suicide. The second essay, “Women and Fiction”, was really good and made me think a lot. Very reminiscent of Ursula Le Guin, if I do say so myself :) It is not surprising then, that throughout the intervening century and a half, numerous modern and contemporary writers have explored the iconic image of the flaneur, from Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway to Teju Cole’s Open City. In these works, the act of wandering a city often becomes a journey of self-discovery and inward reflection.Raccolta di saggi, di argomento prevalentemente letterario, tratti dai due Common Reader, da The Death of the Moth e da The Moment, con come corollario il celebre Una stanza tutta per sé. 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. And indeed, the image of the pencil is one that continually appears in ‘Street Haunting’. As a writer with a penchant for the past and all things nostalgic, it is easy to assume that the pencil is nothing more than a metaphorical tool for Woolf’s desire to communicate through words. But the pencil, in this context, does more than that – Woolf consistently refers to the power of the ‘object’, and here the pencil serves as a medium which allows one to explore their surroundings, an ‘excuse for walking half across London’. 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.

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! 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. 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) As I mentioned, many of the same symbols are scattered between the six entries, but its unclear how deliberate that may be. These essays were not originally compiled side by side, so perhaps the only connection is Virginia Woolf's subconscious. One theme, however, that runs through each is the dignity versus indignity of life. The smallest creatures - snails, dragonflies, rabbits and moths - embody the same struggle against death and indecency that the human characters contend with, and no one escapes unscathed. Disabled people and the elderly serve (in these essays) as absurd proof of decay, and yet they fight against those things too. There's an inescapable sense of not only death, but the cycle of death that traps its prey well before the day they pass away. It feels like there's no way to beat it, to "win." Political ambition does not satisfy; bearing a big family doesn't ensure love or immortality. Marital bliss fades and friends depart. Bodies and minds break down.

Street Haunting” is about the joy of walking through the city streets of London. The essay follows her taking a walk to buy a pencil in the streets of London. The errand is an excuse for her to traverse the streets of London to escape the domesticity of her home. Woolf also speaks of a juxtaposition with the inhabitants of the city and its appearance. Speaking of an experience in Mantua, Italy, Woolf refers to the ‘violent’ arguments she witnessed and being ‘fleeced’ when purchasing a china bowl, which is constantly balanced against the calm and serenity of the setting. The china bowl acts in the same way as the pencil for Woolf, being symbolic of one’s experience and invoking memory. There is a consistent sensory element to these objects that Woolf introduces to us, as though these objects are alive themselves. 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.