(Above: Portrait of Virginia Woolf by Maurice Adams Beck and Helen Mcgregor. April 27, 1925.)
One of the things I love about London is how much I Iove to walk there and, more deeply, how the city awakens that thing within me that needs to wander and call it walking. I often think of Ed White’s book, The Flaneur: A Stroll Through the Paradoxes of Paris while I wander around the London streets and parks. The book was published by Bloomsbury which was named for its London neighborhood. As I sometimes wander around that neighborhood I think of the Bloomsbury Set to which Virginia Woolf belonged. Once after a day of wandering, I searched around for anything she might have written about walking around London. This is what I found.
I apologize for not putting this up this weekend. I saved it to proofread before publishing it and did not return to it to do that because as often happens in my life I forgot to follow up. I will think more about that - doing the work but not quite completing the task - when I return to London in November for four months and wonder about my place in the world as I wander.
Here is what Virginia Woolf wrote about her own wandering there. She published Street Haunting two years after Mrs. Dalloway, the novel in which the act of walking – through Westminster, Trafalgar Square, Regent’s Park etc. – connects the range of characters with each other.