Finding the flaneuse: the cultivation of women's interiority in the city

Finding the Flaneuse explores the ways in which the interior lives of female literary characters are influenced and transformed by their interactions in an urban space. By engaging with the heroines in the texts of Elizabeth Gaskell, Louisa May Alcott, Virginia Woolf, and Jean Rhys, I argue that women were as active within the city space as men in the Victorian Era and into the twentieth century. This thesis examines the interior lives of these heroines, how they navigate the social space in order to wander through the urban one, and ultimately how they are changed by it.