Flâneuse is characterised by such playful subversiveness. I imagine Elkin as an intrepid feminist graffiti artist, scrawling 'Woman woz here' on every wall she passes. Deliciously spiky and seditious, she takes her readers on a rich, intelligent and lively meander through cultural history, biography, literary criticism, urban topography and memoir ... Impressively, Elkin doesn’t simply make a case for the re-evaluation of her titular figure; ultimately she makes flânerie itself appear urgent and contemporary. I defy anyone to read this celebratory study and not feel inspired to take to the streets in one way or another.

...sparkling and original ... Her literary peregrinations defy boundaries, fusing cultural history, criticism, psycho-geography and memoir. Both playful and bracingly intelligent, Elkin’s elegant prose unfurls a portrait of the writer as an urban woman ... Elkin revels in this energy, mapping her experience in several cities onto the process and works of women writers and artists, including Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys, Martha Gellhorn, filmmaker Agnès Varda, artist Sophie Calle, and George Sand, in whose footsteps we trod at explosive moments when art and life intersect with periods of great social and political unrest in the city of Paris ... Flâneuse also happens to reflect the polarities our global age: flânerie is rooted, local, nostalgic, but Elkin’s globe-trotting exemplifies the way we live now, mixing cultures, blurring borders and negotiating the widening gaps between identity and place. With perhaps an eerie prescience, Flâneuse examines the interrelationships of city, self and world.

One point Elkin makes in her absorbing new book is that although men had always enjoyed the practice of loafing through city streets with no particular object, just enjoying the scene, women had long been prevented, culturally and practically, from going out alone ... In a sense, Elkin’s book is itself a flânerie, a stroll where the reader may come across an unexpected person or get some ideas about May 1968 or the Situationists. Or marvel over an intriguing bit of research ... If Elkin’s capsule biographies can occasionally seem a bit potted, they are never uninteresting. Elkin has an eye for the unexpected detail, as befits a flâneuse ... It will be up to booksellers to figure out how to categorize her pastiche of travel writing, memoir, history and literary nonfiction. A reader, flaneusing along the bookshelves, will find in it some of the pleasures of each.

Despite some intriguing byways, the book as a whole seems padded and ungainly — an awkward conflation of literary memoir and cultural criticism that is probably too self-indulgently academic and idiosyncratic to engage the general reader. Choosing her female subjects with apparent randomness, Elkin ropes together vastly different enterprises ... Elkin devotes the bulk of two chapters to protest and revolutionary movements in Paris — on the assumption that marching is another manifestation of walking. Here, as elsewhere, she voyages far afield and distorts the organizing notion of the flâneuse, whose walking is not generally in the service of some larger cause. From forays into cultural criticism Elkin can turn on a dime to memoir. Scenes, events, and observations from her restlessly peripatetic life thread through the book, sometimes intrusively, but also too sketchily ... Perhaps the best way to appreciate Flâneuse is as a formal embodiment of the concept it struggles to define. From that perspective, the intellectual meandering and genre-crossing nature of her enterprise can be seen as a clever riff on flâneuserie — not simply an exhausting literary slog.

...[an] eclectic and absorbing memoir and cultural history ... Throughout the pages of this erudite yet conversational book, Elkin sets about successfully persuading her audience that the joy of walking in the city belongs now — and has for ages belonged — to both men and women ... The book strikes a rewarding balance between present and past, as it establishes and illustrates the much-needed definition of the flaneuse as 'a determined, resourceful individual keenly attuned to the creative potential of the city, and the liberating possibilities of a good walk' ... Though the book derives its chapter titles primarily from geographic locations, as a whole it feels drifty and meandering, almost like a walk itself. Elkin's sections give the reader the sensation one often has with neighborhoods when one is strolling — the locations feel distinct, but the borders are vague.

Although Elkin’s book went to press before the massive, global women’s rights marches that followed President Trump’s inauguration, she couldn’t have invoked a more apt postscript ... But by focusing on six writers and artists — George Sand, Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys, Agnes Varda, Sophie Calle and Martha Gellhorn — whose life trajectories were deeply influenced by their soles-to-the-pavement, eyes-on-the-street engagement with cities, her book makes a forceful case for the genderless joy and vital importance of striking out for the territory — on foot ... Elkin’s book occasionally suffers from tonal inconsistencies between research-heavy passages that read almost as if they were repurposed academic papers or lectures, and doleful accounts of the author’s 'soul-scarring' love affairs ... Back in New York, she sees only 'two speeds of life…married or very, very young,' which makes me want to urge her to look harder, and not just through the lens of her own preoccupations. But Flâneuse is a stimulating read whose itinerary ranges from wanderlust and space as 'a feminist issue' to self-definition in connection with a specific place.

The arc of Elkin’s book is a personal one, and as a result it takes in her difficult relationship with 'home' as both a place and a concept. It is perhaps surprising that the early chapter on her Long Island suburban upbringing is one of the most stunning and engaging sections, detailing the inbuilt isolation and purposelessness of strip malls, unwalkable streets and disengaged neighbourhoods ... Pursuing an alternate, embedded and often political history of women, Elkin offers a counterpoint to the male flânerie enshrined by Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin, the 'psychogeography' of the French Situationists and Will Self, and the 'deep topography' of Iain Sinclair. Finding ways to reframe images of women walking and to reverse male gazes, Flâneuse builds on recent work by Elkin’s fellow writer Rebecca Solnit and the artist Laura Oldfield Ford, among others, with striking intellectual vigour and clear, enrapturing prose.

...[a] wide-ranging and inspiring new book ... To unpack the specific burdens of being a female flâneur (or flâneuse) you might expect a trained academic to find her surest footing in literature and history, and indeed Elkin shines when she presents us with the potent image of Emma Bovary, dangerously moving through the city in a covered carriage ... Elkin is adept at evoking the ruminations and free associating that can accompany solitary wandering through familiar and unfamiliar cityscapes. But walking through cities is also about encountering other people, and the author is very good at looking beyond herself and analyzing broader cultural forces that affect how we move through a metropole ... No matter who you are, Elkin has written a book that will inspire one to take to the streets.

Lauren Elkin brings breadth and depth to a cocktail party crowded with genius. If she lacks the crystalline spareness of Ms. Didion, the wryness of Parker or the rawness of Ms. Smith, she blends memoir, history and cultural criticism in illuminating ways ... Her walkabouts in Paris and elsewhere unfold in layers, like the palimpsest of signs and shadows in the photograph of the peeling, paint-crusted Parisian wall with which Flâneuse begins ... Her historical and literary portraits take their power from her talent for seeing aslant, making the familiar strange and vice versa ... Ms. Elkin’s clear-eyed view of her own flâneuserie is one of the charms of a book that is pedestrian in the best possible sense: It makes you want to walk.

The literary genealogy that Elkins constructs for the walking, idling, loitering, wandering woman in Flâneuse is urgent also for its connection to feminist efforts in places that do not appear in the book ... In Flâneuse, Elkins undoes women’s penchant for self-blame by revealing feminine discomfort in urban spaces as a product of our exclusion from the right to freely explore them. The consequences go beyond chafing at the boundary: Creativity is the product of an alchemy that involves who we are, what we see and where we see it. Elkins presents an assessment of the cost of staying home, of closing ourselves to the inspirational, generative, or romantic encounter — walled and warded off by getting in a car, or a bus, or a train, by saying no to that risky endeavor: taking a walk.

Flâneuse is a deeply pleasurable book, whether you are a man or a woman, whether you know these cities (or books, or writers, or artists) or not. You will see these streets anew, just as if you were a flâneur in a New York neighborhood or along a canal in Venice. There is always something more to explore, just around the next corner—or on the next page.

She brings a keen sense of place to her writing along with personal, cultural, historical and literary explorations ... The book is diverse in its range of subjects: war correspondent Martha Gellhorn’s walks in 1936 war-torn Madrid, an analysis of filmmaker Agnes Varda’s films exploring Paris neighborhoods, an examination of artist Sophie Calle’s work which tests limits and issues of privacy and Elkin’s isolation in a Tokyo high-rise with no place to walk. Richly layered with references to books, art and film, the writing meanders from place to place and time frame to time frame. But as an excursion of discovery, it’s an engaging, often surprising, read about women who knew the 'liberating possibilities of a good walk.'”

The parameters seem fairly broad. Flâneuse tends to sweep across time and place on a surprising scale, given the immediate, eye-level experience one might expect more of in a book ostensibly about walking the city (though each chapter does take a set of personalized directions as its epigraph) … The hybrid approach, which flips between snippets of her own life and those of the women she writes about, is searching and meandering, full of cultural insight and a diverse range of references … Gentrification’s threat to the diversity of the world’s major metropolises is another subject that should be of concern to the flâneuse. Elkin’s book mostly overlooks the phenomenon (maybe not by coincidence, all her main subjects are white), in part because she seems attached to a romantic idea of the city as a place wholly different from the suburbs.