Writing of walking

At 3pm this afternoon Radio 4’s Ramblings with Clare Balding will broadcast a programme about The Walking Book Club, to which Emily Rhodes belongs.

‘I love walking in London,’ said Mrs Dalloway. ‘Really it’s better than walking in the country.’

As a keen reader, writer and walker, I am always intrigued when an author writes a walk into their work of fiction.

Clarissa Dalloway’s walk from Westminster to Bond Street at the beginning of Mrs Dalloway is one of Virginia Woolf’s most astonishing authorial feats. Woolf notes the outside world – ‘shop-keepers were fidgeting in their windows with their paste and diamonds … June had drawn out every leaf on the trees … the policeman held up his hand …’ – but, at the same time, captures the run of Clarissa’s thoughts. Her mind wanders, recollects, imagines, and we can see into this personal interior world, which exists simultaneously and in such contrast to the tangible exterior world of things.