London Rooms

Abstract

Virginia Woolf liked to walk around London. We have become very familiar, as critics and as readers of Woolf, with the ways in which she documents, celebrates, fictionalises and transforms the activity of walking through urban spaces. Her novels, her short stories, her essays and her diaries all contain traces of walks and they also stage arguments about the importance and the fascinations of the kind of walking we have come to know as ‘street haunting’. Woolf’s relation to the city as a public space, and specifically as a modern public space, has informed a series of attempts to theorise the particular meanings of modernity, and indeed of modernism, for women.