This book wasn’t what I expected. It begins with the definition of the French word flâneur: a man with the money and time to wander aimlessly around the city, taking in the spectacle of it all.  Women of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were, of course, excluded from the activity of aimless wandering…although not all women submitted to this exclusion. Elkin’s book is about these women — writers, photographers, painters, directors — but it’s also about Elkins herself, a writer from the suburbs of […]