In her effort to challenge dominant theories of late-capitalist urban spaces on the one hand and the legacy of the Enlightenment materialism on the other, Arina Cirstea turns to British women novelists whose works record and reimagine the emergence of London as a modern metropolis in all its contradictions. She considers the works of Charlotte Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell and Virginia Woolf as representative of the Victorian era (Cirstea reminds us that Woolf is not just a modernist but also a late Victorian), but her focus is the past six decades in the city as captured by Doris Lessing, Sara Maitland and Michèle Roberts. As Cirstea puts it in ‘Prologue: mapping the urban imaginary’, the aim is to ‘acknowledge connections between different aspects of urban experience that have been hitherto marginalised in both contemporary spatial theory and ... literary studies’ (p. 16). The connections that interest Cirstea are found in the character development that the novelists chart for their heroines: virtually all the protagonists are women who follow their ambitions and desires in the ever-changing streets, in offices during women’s groups meetings and finally in their own minds, discovering spiritual and utopian yearnings. Cirstea’s implication is that literary characters are not just creations of their authors but also their reflections, representative of real-life Londoners, Victorian, modern and contemporary, white and cis-female. It is a significant percentage of the population but far from allencompassing. Nonetheless, Cirstea’s layered discussion of novels centred around Londoners is a compelling contribution to the fields of urban studies and feminist literary theory alike.

中文翻译：

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书评：英国女性作家的城市想象：空间、自我和灵性，Arina Cirstea

为了一方面挑战晚期资本主义城市空间的主导理论，另一方面挑战启蒙唯物主义的遗产，Arina Cirstea 求助于英国女性小说家，她们的作品记录并重新想象伦敦作为现代大都市的崛起它的矛盾。她认为夏洛特·勃朗特、伊丽莎白·盖斯凯尔和弗吉尼亚·伍尔夫的作品是维多利亚时代的代表（Cirstea 提醒我们，伍尔夫不仅是现代主义者，也是维多利亚晚期的人），但她的重点是这座城市过去 6 年的被捕获作者：多丽丝·莱辛、萨拉·梅特兰和米歇尔·罗伯茨。正如 Cirstea 在“序言：绘制城市想象”中所说的那样，其目的是“承认迄今为止在当代空间理论和……中被边缘化的城市体验的不同方面之间的联系…… 文学研究”（第 16 页）。Cirstea 感兴趣的联系体现在小说家为她们的女主人公描绘的角色发展中​​：几乎所有的主角都是女性，她们在瞬息万变的街道、办公室里的妇女团体会议上，最后在自己的脑海中追随自己的野心和欲望，发现精神和乌托邦的渴望。Cirstea 的含义是，文学人物不仅是作者的创作，也是他们的反映，代表现实生活中的伦敦人、维多利亚时代、现代和当代、白人和顺式女性。它占人口的很大比例，但远非全面。尽管如此，Cirstea 对以伦敦人为中心的小说的分层讨论是对城市研究和女权主义文学理论等领域的引人注目的贡献。