“Place names were the most powerful magic I knew,” Martha Gellhorn wrote in her memoir Travels with Myself and Another. The pioneering photographer and traveller is one of the abiding spirits of Lauren Elkin’s Flâneuse, an intense meditation on what it means to be a woman and walk out in the world. Gellhorn – intrepid observer, wife of Ernest Hemingway, friend of Robert Capa – is an icon of independence. Elkin is a New Yorker who now lives in Paris, though she has also spent time in Tokyo, Venice and London: but in the 21st century this is not all that unusual. Elkin is under no illusions that her peripatetic life, spent studying in Europe or following a boyfriend to Japan, confers any sheen of glamour upon her. But Flâneuse isn’t after glamour: it’s a book that encourages its readers to lace up their shoes and go for a walk.
“Flâneuse,” you might well ask – “what’s that?” The male form, flâneur, means “an idler, a dawdler, usually found in cities”. As for its feminine form, Elkin admits that official recognition is hard to come by. “The Dictionnaire vivant de la langue française defines it, believe it or not, as a kind of lounge chair.” No matter. The word began to be heard towards the middle of the 19th century; usage peaked during the Roaring (or perhaps they might be called the Walking) Twenties. Yet, for Elkin, it was her move to Paris, one of the greatest cities to experience on foot, that marked her self-identification as a flâneuse. “Learning to see meant not being able to look away; to walk in the streets of Paris was to walk the thin line of fate that divided us from each other.”
Content from our partners
