ABSTRACT

This chapter considers the connection between idling, spatiality and urban sensibility in one of Virginia Woolf’s London essays. The walker often finds him- or herself at the fringes of society, and this is especially the case with Woolf’s walker or with Woolf as walker: her spaces are transitory, they represent everyday urban potentialities and they oscillate between a more or less immediate kind of referentiality. They are subject to a continuous contestation orchestrated by the gaze of the walking observer or, rather, the traveler-narrator. These spaces are “idle” in the sense that they only come into being by being moved through - and it is Woolf’s agenda to be (in) several minds and places at the same time. Focusing on her London essay “Street Haunting” the chapter shows that Woolf’s essays represent different versions of the effects of practiced idleness on the individual and her experience with the surrounding social and cultural space, constituting a bridge between the Victorian and modernist idlers.