e decide espairecer percorrendo vários locais icónicos da capital inglesa como Oxford Street, a Strand e as margens do Tamisa. And finally, “Street Haunting”. This story was an absolute delight. More than that, it was probably the first time I saw myself so much in a book. The very opening of this makes me convinced Virginia Woolf can see in my brain.

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 But what could be more absurd? It is, in fact, on the stroke of six; it is a winter’s evening; we are walking to the Strand to buy a pencil. How, then, are we also on a balcony, wearing pearls in June? What could be more absurd? Yet it is nature’s folly, not ours. When she set about her chief masterpiece, the making of man, she should have thought of one thing only. Instead, turning her head, looking over her shoulder, into each one of us she let creep instincts and desires which are utterly at variance with his main being, so that we are streaked, variegated, all of a mixture; the colours have run. Is the true self this which stands on the pavement in January, or that which bends over the balcony in June? Am I here, or am I there? Or is the true self neither this nor that, neither here nor there, but something so varied and wandering that it is only when we give the rein to its wishes and let it take its way unimpeded that we are indeed ourselves? 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. But here we must stop peremptorily. We are in danger of digging deeper than the eye approves; we are impeding our passage down the smooth stream by catching at some branch or root. At any moment, the sleeping army may stir itself and wake in us a thousand violins and trumpets in response; the army of human beings may rouse itself and assert all its oddities and sufferings and sordidities. Let us dally a little longer, be content still with surfaces only–the glossy brilliance of the motor omnibuses; the carnal splendour of the butchers’ shops with their yellow flanks and purple steaks; the blue and red bunches of flowers burning so bravely through the plate glass of the florists’ windows. 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 the end, Woolf’s message is clear, even if its fed through the image of the pencil: objects have power, and they communicate in ways that their human counterparts may not be able to. The pencil and the written word is ultimately shown to bring strangers together in Woolf’s piece, and becomes a metaphor in the tale of the stationer: ‘[standing together] in forced neutrality, one had to be particular in one’s choice of pencils’. I feel this encapsulates Woolf’s view of the London crowd – in the city especially, individuals are often unwillingly pushed together in a crowd, and in view of this we always seek what is most comfortable for us. We are ‘ particular in one’s choice of pencil’.

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Baudelaire, Charles, and Jonathan Mayne. The Painter of Modern Life, and Other Essays. London: Phaidon, 1964. 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) Her first novel, The Voyage Out, appeared in 1915, and she then worked through the transitional Night and Day (1919) to the highly experimental and impressionistic Jacob's Room (1922). From then on her fiction became a series of brilliant and extraordinarily varied experiments, each one searching for a fresh way of presenting the relationship between individual lives and the forces of society and history. She was particularly concerned with women's experience, not only in her novels but also in her essays and her two books of feminist polemic, A Room of One's Own (1929) and Three Guineas (1938). 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 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.Of course, any attempt to sum up a writer will be partial. But to read Virginia's letters and diaries, to walk the same London streets, and to speak to those that knew her is the most rewarding way to approach her life and work. Her final letter to Leonard renders meaningless all the speculation and rumours which have surrounded Virginia since her death: suspicions of childhood abuse, sexual frigidity and lesbian tendencies, her childlessness and mental illness, the failure of her marriage. To me, Virginia's final words read more like a love letter than a suicide note: Reading as a diary entry, Street Haunting: A London Adventure includes imaginative observations and vivid reflections on city life. Woolf is widely known as one of the most influential modernist writers of the 20th century, and this classic essay offers a glimpse into the innerworkings of her brilliant mind. 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.

Words, English words, are full of echoes, of memories, of associations - naturally. They have been out and about, on people's lips, in their houses, in the streets, in the fields, for so many centuries. And that is one of the chief difficulties in writing them today - that they are so stored with meanings, with memories, that they have contracted so many famous marriages.” A collection of short stories and essays; one of which was the best I HAVE EVER READ : Street haunting. Absolutely stunning. Throughout my reading I didn't stop wondering how someone can reach such literary perfection. I feel like I am slowly immersing myself into Woolf's world and her stream of consciousness style. I also read some scraps of the French translated version that I had within reach -available under the title " Au hasard des rues - Une aventure londonienne "- and I loved the translation.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.