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Publication date 25 January 2025.
Overseas shipping from: https://www.hatchards.co.uk/book/virginia-woolf-in-the-city-oxford-street-tide/louisa-albani/9781739326838
 
'Louisa Albani’s pamphlet is a remarkable, multi-media celebration of Woolf’s love of urban space. The pamphlet combines Albani’s mesmerizing illustrations with the text of Woolf’s essay ‘Oxford Street Tide’ and reflections from Woolf scholars. A true delight!’
Professor Anna Snaith, King’s College London
 
When Virginia Woolf first moved to 46 Gordon Square in 1904, with her sister Vanessa and brothers Thoby and Adrian, it seemed ‘the most beautiful, the most exciting, the most romantic place in the world’ to her. The formation of the Bloomsbury Group must have intensified this sense of freedom and desire for creativity and ‘adventures’ in the city.
 
Virginia Woolf loved walking the streets of London, sometimes at night in winter time, and evocatively expressed in her essay Street Haunting: A London Adventure. Tavistock Square, where she lived with her husband Leonard from 1924 to 1939, was the place where she ‘made up’ her brilliant novels To the Lighthouse and Mrs Dalloway. She also wrote an essay, Oxford Street Tide, that revealed the impact of modernity on Oxford Street, in which she chronicled the seductive power of display alongside the invisible wheels of production, the constant destruction and rebuilding, the need for invention and ‘spectacle’ but also the relentless pressure of trying to make a living and keep ‘afloat on the bounding, careless, remorseless tide of the street.’
 
This pamphlet celebrates her walk down the iconic street, as well as mapping her within the literary landscape of Bloomsbury.
With contributions by
Mark Hussey and Derek Ryan.
Edited and designed by Louisa Albani
All artworks Louisa Albani
A5 pamphlet 36pp. 18 colour illustrations.