Part cultural meander, part memoir, Flâneuse traces the relationship between singular women and their cities as a way to map her own lifea journey that begins in New York and takes us to Paris, via Venice, Tokyo, and Londonincluding the paths beaten by such flâneuses as the cross-dressing, nineteenth-century novelist George Sand, the Parisian artist Sophie Calle, the journalist Martha Gellhorn, and the writer Jean Rhys. With tenacity and insight, Elkin creates a mosaic of what urban settings have meant to women, charting through literature, art, history, and film womens sometimes liberating, sometimes fraught relationship to the metropolis.