Eir own streets

During the 20th century more women artists claimed free movement. In the 1930s Martha Gellhorn coined a verb to assert the artist’s need to walk: “To flâner is as necessary as solitude, that’s how the compost keeps growing in the mind.”

Had the author not loved walking, this book might not have emerged. “Why do I walk? I walk because I like it.” Well researched, larded with examples, Elkin’s book is held together, sometimes superfluously, by personal experience of rambling in various cities, and charts women artists’ road to walking freely — though still sometimes with unwanted attention.

This picaresque account of a picaresque longing successfully paints women back into the city and demonstrates that things have improved. But a paradox is that while in French the extra word flâneuse may be necessary, in English, it is not. Perhaps English women have always stamped around with more impunity; but at any rate, in her fascinating work of flânerie, or what she calls flâneuserie, Elkin reboots the appetite to go walking and thinking in the city, which can only be a good thing.