Commentary

“Look at that! Look at that!” says the dwarf in Virginia Woolf’s essay “Street Haunting” whose face wore a “peevish” expression when she entered the boot shop but suddenly brightened with pride “as she thrust her foot out, for behold it was the shapely, perfectly proportioned foot of a well–grown woman. It was arched; it was aristocratic. Her whole manner changed as she looked at it resting on the stand.” On a mission to buy a pencil,  Woolf haunted the streets of London in winter like a ghost on “the greatest of adventures,” entering into the lives of others. She meets “Two bearded men, brothers, apparently, stone–blind, supporting themselves by resting a hand on the head of a small boy between them, and as they passed, holding straight on, the little convoy seemed to cleave asunder the passers–by with the momentum of its silence, its directness, its disaster.” She finds homeless including the “humped body of an old woman flung abandoned on the step of a public building with a cloak over her like the hasty covering thrown over a dead horse or donkey” who “lie not a stone’s throw from the sequined cloaks and bright legs of diners and dancers” on their way to a party at the Mayfield mansion where sofas “are supported by the gilt necks of proud swans; tables inlaid with baskets of many colored fruit; sideboards paved with green marble the better to support the weight of boars’ heads; and carpets so softened with age that their carnations have almost vanished in a pale green sea.” At last she arrives at the stationer’s shop where the quarreling owners were a couple who in the process of finding the box of pencils—“A pencil, a pencil,” the husband repeated, “certainly, certainly”—calm down: “their heat was going down, their anger disappearing.”

—THE