Streetwalking the Metropolis makes an important contribution to ongoing debates on gender, the city and modernity. Re-drawing the gendered map of urban modernism, it offers stimulating accounts of a range of writers including Amy Levy, Dorothy Richardson, Virginia Woolf, Rosamund Lehmann. Jean Rhys, Janet Flanner, Djuna Barnes, Anais Nin, Elizabeth Bowen and Doris Lessing.

Can there be a flaneuse, and what form might she take? This is the central question of Streetwalking the Metropolis, an important contribution to ongoing debates on the city and modernity in which Deborah Parsons re-draws the gendered map of urban modernism. Assessing the cultural and literary history of the concept of the flaneur, the urban observer/writer traditionally gendered as masculine, the author advances critical space for the discussion of a female 'flaneuse, ' focused around a range of women writers from the 1880's to World War Two, including Amy Levy, Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys, Djuna Barnes, Anais Nin, Elizabeth Bowen and Doris Lessing.

This is a fascinating, meticulous, needling book ... Her view of the history of twentieth-century feminist writing is positive and forward-looking ... compelling book.