Powerfully drawn to both rural and urban environments, Virginia Woolf is in many ways the quintessential peripatetic English modernist. Her thoughtful analyses of the psychic impacts of places reveal ideas about the country and the city that challenge common assumptions, such as the idea that the urban necessarily represents culture and enclosure, while the rural is the home of a bucolic, idealized “Nature”. She suggests that the cosmopolitan, transient dynamics of modernity provoke a crisis of English national identity, problematizing notions of authenticity and belonging, exclusion and borders. In this paper, I will argue that for Woolf, the crisis engendered by this artificial urban-rural dualism should be viewed not as a symptom of a perniciously fragmented and alienated modern consciousness, but rather as indicative of an emerging broader understanding of our relationship with the environment and nonhuman animals. In exploring these ideas, Woolf employs eschatological imagery: the ultimate destruction of human civilization, she suggests, is a possibility that perpetually haunts modernity. Yet what is ultimately gestured towards is not so much a post-human world, as one in which the boundaries between human and nonhuman are challenged.

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Woolf repeatedly voices an insistent craving for a specific sense of wildness in her letters and diaries; she is drawn to the transgressive possibilities of urban life, and aligns it with a sense of escaping cultural boundaries more commonly associated with rural wilderness. An essay like “Street Haunting: A London Adventure” (1927) implicitly challenges the notion that the rural environment provides a sense of freedom which the urban cannot; or, to put the point more broadly, that rural and urban spaces stimulate different clusters of emotions which do not overlap or mingle. We should note, as Hermione Lee remarks, that her urban novels are arguably “the most pastoral city novels ever written” (421); and, as Lawrence Buell states, that Mrs Dalloway might be classed as a rare example of what he calls “urban bioregional imagination”(86).