The semi‐detached flâneuse: feminine diversity in Romantic London

Abstract

Accounts of Romantic London tend to overlook the presence of respectable, middle‐class female town dwellers. Without a trope, similar to the masculine flâneur, to capture women's metropolitan experiences, there is no focal point around which a feminine literature of modernity might coalesce, and consequently, an important aspect of the city's diversity is ignored. This article suggests that such a figure, a “semi‐detached flâneuse,” is present in select women's writing of the period, and it identifies an example in The Sylphid (1799–1800), a series of prose sketches set in the capital by poet and novelist Mary Robinson. Like her male counterpart, Robinson's city woman moves independently through the urban scene, but she differs from him in the compassionate, reforming gaze she directs at those she encounters in metropolitan sites of leisure. With roots in eighteenth‐century models of sympathy while looking forward to the modern metropolis, Robinson's flâneuse expands the possibilities for a female urban presence, describes a femininity markedly different from contemporary stereotypes, and serves as a lens through which to recover a more complete portrait of London's diversity in the Romantic period.