Woolf's representation of London in “Street Haunting: A London Adventure” (1927) attests to Woolf's fascination with the city as well as her engagement with this quintessential modernist space and its celebration of impermanence, change, and the new. The currency of the city is premised on energy, discovery, invention, and creativity, and its commodity culture not only stimulates the senses, desires and the imagination, but clearly resonates with Woolf's own modernist aesthetics. The provisionality and shifting nature of the city's commodity spectacle echo the sense of fluidity, ambiguity, and “the momentary” that Woolf aimed to create, and importantly these formal experiments and representations of the city are key to the subversive politics of her work. As others have pointed out, Woolf's representation of the city is indicative of her attention to the economic and gendered politics of space and these interconnected political concerns come together in “Street Haunting.” The woman narrator trespasses on the male privilege of the flâneur as she goes street walking on the pretext of a shopping trip, yet her “acceptable” role as a shopper (a role that legitimates a woman's presence in the city) is barely fulfillled by her minimal purchase. She partakes in both the fascinating spectacle and excitement of the city's commodity culture, even as she bears witness to the shocking and terrible eff ects of capitalism's failure to deliver all it promises. Woolf's essay revels in the excesses of commodity display as it also draws attention to those who are left destitute at the margins of the seemingly endless abundance created by commerce.

What also becomes significantly apparent is that, although the essay is structured around four transactions, Woolf's “shopper” is actually a participant in an economy at odds with capitalism—that is the gift economy. While the essay makes clear the pleasures of window-shopping, it also voices a scathing criticism of the ruthlessness of capitalism, as the narrator moves towards participation in increasingly generous exchanges. Although it is not clear whether Woolf knew Marcel Mauss's groundbreaking ethnographic study, The Gift (published in 1925), she would have been aware of developments in anthropology and the newly emerging area of ethnography through her connection with Cambridge academics, notably her friendship with Jane Harrison.