Lauren Elkin’s “Flâneuse,” part cultural history, part personal memoir, fervently celebrates women who have asserted their freedom and sharpened their identities by taking to urban streets — whether ...

Cities have always been fertile ground for artists and inquiring minds, and no phenomenon has captured this notion more than that of the flâneur. The flâneur is typically described as a man who ...

This elegant book considers defiant female walkers from Martha Gellhorn and Virginia Woolf to the author, and celebrates the freedom of being on the move In Doris Lessing’s The Summer Before the Dark, ...

Simply sign up to the Life & Arts myFT Digest -- delivered directly to your inbox. “Paris is a huge home-sick peasant,” wrote the British poet and novelist Hope Mirrlees in 1919. “He carries a ...

*Originally published on April 22, 2022. Most French dictionaries don't even include the word: Flâneuse — a noun, the feminine form of Flâneur. It means an idler, a dawdling observer, usually ...

We’ll send you a myFT Daily Digest email rounding up the latest Life & Arts news every morning. Though one definition is “one who wanders aimlessly”, the word flâneur has come to conjure up a rather ...

Lauren Elkin’s study of women walkers shows how putting one foot in front of the other can be a radical act. By Erica Wagner “Place names were the most powerful ­magic I knew,” Martha Gellhorn wrote ...

In this enjoyable memoir-cum-cultural history, Lauren Elkin calls upon the female spirit of idle strolling The flâneur was born in 19th-century Paris, his native habitat the boulevards and arcades of ...