Woolf’s delight is both that her eye “rests on beauty” and that she “shed the self our friends know us by” and feels “no longer quite. In “Street Haunting: A London Adventure” (1927), Woolf walks “half across London” just to buy a lead pencil and mingle in the urban river of anonymous humanity. Solnit and Woolf both embrace the figure of the intellectual as a wanderer, rambling through landscapes, haunting streets, and changing our perceptions. Reading Solnit next to Woolf gives us a fresh sense of Woolf’s feminist criticism, as Solnit re-charts Woolf’s path and reconfigures our sense of belonging. It is not how our thoughts travel, nor does it allow us to map the whole world.” For Solnit and Woolf, thought travels by detour and collision, by “trespassing geographical and intellectual.” Solnit pays homage to and transforms Woolf’s ideas about wandering, thinking, human rights, and community. The contemporary essayist Rebecca Solnit renovates Woolf’s metaphor, writing in Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics (2007): “the straight line of conventional narrative is too often an elevated freeway permitting no unplanned encounters or necessary detours. Having lost her thought at a border enforced by patriarchy, Woolf raises the problems of wandering, trespassing, and thinking as a woman. Woolf next remarks: “What idea it had been that had sent me so audaciously trespassing, I could not now remember.” She is immediately intercepted, however, by “a man’s figure” and told to use the gravel path. While she sits beside the river, thought lets “its line down into the stream, letting the water lift it and sink it, until-you know the little tug-the sudden conglomeration of an idea at the end of one’s line.” Upon hauling in the thought, Woolf remarks that it might be best “put back.” Yet once put back, the thought excites her again, and Woolf walks off “with extreme rapidity” over the Oxbridge grass. In A Room of One’s Own (1929), Virginia Woolf famously speaks of the way a thought comes upon her. For Rebecca Solnit and Virginia Woolf, thought travels by detour and collision.

Solnit walking