A Sense of Place: Virginia Woolf’s “Hauntings”

Virginia Woolf regularly went on what she called “street hauntings,” where she wandered around London. She wanted to feel absorbed in her surroundings, and in particular to watch people’s interactions with the city. She described this as leading to a “dissolution of the self,” a sense that the boundaries between herself and her environment were erased. Her innovative fiction captures brilliantly that amorphous interiority, as well as the sensory experience of the outdoors.

A recent exhibition at the Fitzwilliams Museum in Cambridge, of works inspired by Virginia Woolf’s writings, explored the relationship of landscape and feminism and importance of place to Woolf. The catalogue states: “Woolf’s writing acts as a prism through which to explore feminist perspectives on landscape, domesticity, and identity in modern and contemporary art.” It was in Cambridge that Woolf delivered the lectures that went on to become her most famous essay A Room of One’s Own.