PARIS is too obvious, too predictable a setting for an epiphany, really. All that grandeur and prettiness. But there you go. Predictable things happens. Just ask Lauren Elkin.

A suburban girl who grew up in Long Island, Elkin never walked as a child. Journeys were made by car. You went from one place to another. There was no lingering, no pausing, no meandering or going the long way round. The purpose was the journey and the journey was the purpose.

And then she went to Paris as a student and she found that this was not the only way to travel. She discovered a walkable city, a city full of streets that were not just a conduit for getting from here to there. She found that the streets were full of people and ideas and stories. If you slowed down and looked around. She lived in the fifth arrondissement where people played accordion in squares at the weekend and old men and women danced to Edith Piaf in public.

Shortly after she moved to the city of light in 2004 Elkin discovered the concept of the flaneur. This idea of a leisurely man idling down the boulevard observing the urban spectacle. The notion appealed to her. It chimed with the way she was discovering the city on foot.

But, she wondered, why did the observer have to be a man? Didn’t women live in cities, walk through them, observe what was going on?

“When I started doing the research I found that the critics in general agreed there was no such figure as the flaneuse because at the time when the flaneur was codified in the mid-19th century only men really had the freedom to come and go as they pleased in the city and women were caught in these economies of the gaze; having to be home with the children or protect their reputations and not be seen as loose and without morals walking aimlessly in the city.

“But that doesn’t alter the fact that there have always been women in cities, that women have always been writing about cities and made art about cities.”

Elkin thought it was time someone started paying attention. “A few years ago I was like ‘I think the time has come.’ I’d read enough articles in the Observer by Will Self and Iain Sinclair and all of their friends reifying this masculine writer-walker perspective. And I thought there are women out there. Let’s see what they have been saying about cities.”

The result is a book, Flaneuse, that offers an elegant merging of literary and social history and memoir. In its pages Elkin follows the novelist George Sand through the streets of Paris during the June rebellion of 1832, tracks Virginia Woolf as she trips through Bloomsbury in 1920s London. It seeks out journalist Martha Gellhorn in Madrid during the Spanish Civil War and artist Sophie Calle following a stranger around Venice in 1980. Women walking, writing the city in their footsteps.

“I’m suggesting that there were women on the streets idling and looking at the world the way the flaneur had done, but we’ve been written out of history,” Elkin says. “We’ve been made invisible not because we wanted to be but because the mythology of the city has called for there to be a flaneur not a flaneuse.”

Indeed, this invisibility is often written into the fabric of the city itself. At one point in Flaneuse she tells us that there are twice as many statues of dogs in Edinburgh as there are of women.

It’s a book about gender and class (as Elkin points out, at the end of the day the idea of “lingering down a beautiful boulevard is actually a super-bougie way of thinking about the world”). And it’s also a book about self-revelation.

Elkin walks into the story too after all, discovering herself in Paris, unhappily following a partner to Tokyo and finding a city that seems expressly anti-ambulatory. The weather didn’t help; “it was incredibly hot the time I was there and the air was like soup. You couldn’t move in it without passing out.” Realising, too, that she no longer belongs to New York, the city that she had grown up close to.

Why did she decide the teller was part of the tale? “As I was writing I realised I had to include some sense of how for me walking enabled me to think critically about the world and break out of that routine, rote way of living,

“I have great fondness for the suburbs where I’m from but I’ve found through living in cities and walking in cities I have accessed a level of independence and autonomy and creativity that I just wouldn’t have had if I’d stayed where I’m from.”

Perhaps we should ask the obvious question. What is it about walking that equals discovery? It’s a rhythm thing, she suggests. “It’s sort of putting thought and movement into play at the same time.”

The speed of thought matches the speed of movement. You think more slowly, more deeply. “Walking slowly you noticed things in the world you wouldn’t necessarily if you were on a bus or in your car or on a bicycle.”

The flaneuse, she concedes is principally a 20th-century figure. George Sand may have been walking the same streets as her male counterparts but she was wearing her brother’s breeches and boots to do so. She was something of an exception.

That would change after the First World War, Elkin points out, because of technological advancements, the rise of semi-private public spaces such as the cinema and the department store and the fact that more and more women entering the workforce. “I would date it back to 1890,” Elkin argues, “and the rise of the new woman. You start to see women in public enjoying it a lot more.”

By 1927 when Virginia Woolf wrote her essay Street Haunting there is an implicit claiming of space for the female spectator. Or rather, for Woolf, a de-gendering of the very idea, Elkin believes. “It’s really about the androgyny of the freedom of the streets. Claiming your right to walk and not be gendered when you do it. Not to be told ‘Oh honey, better be careful. Don’t walk down that street. Don’t wear anything too revealing.’ Woolf’s just claiming the right for women to be in public without ever saying the word woman.”

This sounds desirable. But. But can we really pretend that women are invisible? Isn’t the male gaze always in play for a start? Elkin would like to think otherwise. “A lot of this book is militating for the right for women walkers and their stories of walking to be read and acknowledged and integrated into the canon of writing about walking.

“But at the same time we don’t want to be made to stand out, to be made to feel uncomfortable walking down the street. A lot of the point of the book is to create some kind of shift in the way we regard public space. I wouldn’t reduce it down to the male gaze necessarily because I think a lot of men feel uncomfortable in various situations.”

These days Elkin lives in multicultural Belleville in the north-east of Paris, “partly really ugly, partly really interesting.” Ten years ago, she recalls the Belleville Metro station smelt of urine. She’s happy to report that’s no longer the case. She doesn’t need the streets to be picturesque anymore to find them interesting. Her idea of the city has expanded over the years too, although she tells me that she is rather happy with the conservatism of Parisian urban planning which, unlike, say, London, is resisting mass real estate development projects in the city centre.

“I’m very pleased that Paris is being maintained as a ‘museum city’, because it actually means people can use the streets in a way that feels spontaneous.”

Will we though? Now so many of us walk the streets looking at our phones rather than the streets around us. We live increasingly onscreen.

Elkin is aware of that. She is currently revising her next book, a “short, possibly cheeky” diary of a year riding the bus in Paris and taking notes on her iPhone because, she says, everyone around her were on their phones and not paying any attention to the world outside.

“We’re going to use these screens. They’re part of our lives. So how can we use them to be more aware of the world around us?”

Time to take a walk and think about that perhaps.

Flaneuse by Lauren Elkin is published by Chatto & Windus, priced £14.99