Virginia Woolf’s literary vision has never stayed quietly on the page; it resists being contained within literature alone. Her unique perspective on modern consciousness and urban experience has transcended her own time, continuing to inspire artists working across a wide range of creative practices, from the visual and performing arts to music, cinema and exhibitions. This creative afterlife is visible in the Woolf Arts Archive, where contemporary artists reinterpret Woolf's works through their engagement with her visual imagination, the rhythm of her prose and her sustained attention to the depths of human consciousness. Illustrator Louisa Amelia Albani is one of many contemporary voices in this ongoing dialogue, translating Woolf's literary sensibility into visual language. She pursues this through her own independent publishing enterprise, Night Bird Press, working within a tradition of artist-writer presses that echoes Virginia and Leonard Woolf's Hogarth Press. Within this spirit, her illustrated pamphlets are sites where publishing becomes a creative extension of artistic vision. In her Virginia Woolf in the City: Oxford Street Tide pamphlet, Albani focuses on a motif central to Woolf's world: the act of walking, so often through the urban streets where Woolf situates modern experience. Before turning to how Woolf's texts take shape in her illustrations, we first need to consider what walking meant for Woolf.

In Woolf’s works, walking is never just a way of getting from one place to another; it is almost as natural and essential as thinking. The rhythm of a step is the rhythm of a sentence; the turning of a corner reflects the shift of a thought. Her revolutionary stream of consciousness technique is not limited to a static, internal monologue confined to a chair by a window. It is dynamic, driven by the body in motion and its content is determined by the visual field in which that body moves. As the mind does not invent in a vacuum; it becomes a gatherer that collects the raw material of consciousness from the streets, gardens and passing crowds. Therefore, walking functions as the engine of perception; the inner world merges with the outer, where the solitary self blends into the metropolitan tide. This is the essence of the flâneuse— unlike the idle, detached observer of Baudelaire’s masculine tradition, she is an engaged and emotional participant whose interiority is constantly challenged and reflected by the world around her. The rhythmic, visual and fragmented understanding of Woolf’s walking continues to resonate in her artistic afterlife. The walk transcends pages and pavements, becoming an enduring principle of artistic creation and perception, a method of attention through which art itself takes shape.

This principle finds a vivid contemporary expression in Albani’s pamphlet, where Woolf’s iconic essay “Oxford Street Tide” meets Albani’s visual imagination in its exploration of modernity. In the essay, Woolf frames Oxford Street not as a stable setting but as a living current, drawing bodies into its rhythm. Albani’s illustration makes this current visible, transforming the scene from a distant view into a force that pulls figures into its flow. At the centre stands a woman, drawn more distinctly than those around her. Surrounding her, the loosely sketched human forms rush into one another. Their blurred outlines suggest bodies compressed by motion, as if caught mid-drift within the crowd that gradually draws her individuality into collective movement. The wavering horizontal lines that cut across the page visually mirror Woolf's metaphor of the street as a tide: rising, repeating and impossible to resist. Just as the essay follows a walker swept along Oxford Street, the image offers no clear destination, only motion where figures emerge, blur and recede within the flow. This visual fluidity mirrors Woolf’s portrayal of Oxford Street as a space of constant renewal, where demolition and rebuilding are inseparable from display and movement. What Woolf captures here is a form of compulsion: the need to keep moving to remain “afloat on the bounding, careless, remorseless tide of the street” (Woolf, “Oxford Street Tide” 20), as perception unfolds through motion, proximity and sensory overload. Taken together, text and image frame walking as a state of being swept along, an embodied way of perception shaped by the street’s relentless pulse.

This compulsory tide represents only one current in Woolf’s understanding of walking. The other is its opposite: walking as a deliberate, reflective act. This mode finds its visual counterpart in another of Albani’s illustrations: the warm, detailed interior of a bookstore. The scene arrests the forward rush of the street and replaces it with a state of pause, attention and introspection. A solitary woman stands among the bookshelves, momentarily withdrawn from the street’s tide. With her distinctive profile and absorbed posture, the figure strongly evokes Woolf herself, suggesting this is more than a just a reader but the flâneuse. Like the walkers in Woolf's other works, she uses the city as a mental resource while walking—entering shops, lingering and allowing thought to unfold. The bookstore image recalls the more reflective form of walking found in Mrs. Dalloway and Street Haunting: A London Adventure, where wandering the city allows consciousness to expand through observation rather than compulsion. Woolf repeatedly figures such moments—passing by shop windows, stepping inside briefly, gazing without urgency— as intervals where walking slows and the city becomes a site of inward gathering. In Mrs. Dalloway, Clarissa’s pause before the bookshop window opens precisely such a moment, as the narrator asks, “What was she dreaming as she looked into Hatchards’ shop window? What was she trying to recover? What image of white dawn in the country, as she read in the book spread open? (Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway 11). Similarly, in Street Haunting, the narrator, surrounded by “wild books, homeless books” in a second-hand bookshop, forms “sudden capricious friendships with the unknown and the vanished,” as the walk turns inward and opens onto other lives and other times (Woolf, “Street Haunting” 177). This is the kind of pause Albani’s bookstore illustration captures: a momentary suspension within movement itself. The flâneuse pauses to think and imagine, then continues, carrying with her the traces of other lives and voices briefly encountered along the way.

In Woolf's hands, the simple human act of walking appears as a fundamental rhythm of modern existence. Louisa Amelia Albani’s illustrations for “Oxford Street Tide” carry this rhythm forward, showing how movement itself can organize artistic vision. In engaging with Woolf, contemporary artists continue the work of the flâneuse. They move through her textual landscapes, collecting the visual cues carefully placed and transforming them into new forms of perception. They answer Woolf’s call to shed the “shell-like covering” and become “a central oyster of perceptiveness, an enormous eye” (“Street Haunting” 172). By recreating and reinterpreting Woolf's scenes, their works extend her way of seeing, embodying how thought emerges through movement and how the self is continually reshaped in relation to its surroundings. The reality that this simple act continues to generate such profound interpretations is a testament to a core Woolfian principle: to walk, truly, is to think—and to see the world, for a moment, through Woolf’s eyes.

Works Cited

Woolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway. Amazon Classics, 2021.

---. “Oxford Street Tide.” The London Scene, Daunt Books, 2013, pp. 17-21.

---. “Street Haunting: A London Adventure.” Street Haunting and Other Essays, Vintage Books, 2015, pp. 171-81.