“Sojourning, Flaneuring, and the Search for Home”: a review of Rebecca Knuth’s LONDON SOJOURN: Rewriting Life After Retirement by Gretchen Ayoub
London Sojourn: Rewriting Life After Retirement
Rebecca Knuth
She Writes Press
Publication date: 1/27/26
Rebecca Knuth retired from a career as a college professor in 2014 and subsequently moved to London to begin her reinvention. Far from the world of academia, she enrolls in a nine-month Creative Nonfiction Writing program, explores London and the surrounding area, volunteers, and also enrolls in a program to become a tour guide. Her many adventures led her to a renewed appreciation and quest for more understanding of the repression of women writers in the Victorian age and beyond. Lovers of London, Victorian literature and history, and those contemplating the next steps in life post-retirement or as part of a career change will find vignettes and reflections that resonate throughout different parts of the story.
Reinvention has been a popular topic since Eat, Pray, Love burst onto the literary scene in 2003. However, London Sojourn takes us to another question: What is home? Is it a fixed place? A mindset? How does our definition of home change over time?
Knuth lives in Islington, but travels far and wide throughout the city and the surrounding areas. In what she calls “flaneuring,” a term which she credits to writer Lauren Elkin, she wanders, taking in the everyday moments and exploring museums, cemeteries, the desolate area where the Bronte sisters grew up, the streets where Virginia Woolf lived, libraries, and much more. This is not a Rick Steeve’s travel guide, but a journey filled with daily pieces of everyday living in a new place and getting to know the people, and in many ways, more challenging, yourself.
Aspiring writers, those who have experienced the world of academia and those who have made the switch from teacher to student will appreciate her soul-searching transition from formal academic writing to creative nonfiction. As she moves through the historical sites and libraries, her interest in the repression of women writers and artists is a refresher course on this period in literary history. Drawing upon her research expertise, both as an academician and writer (Libricide: The Regime-Sponsored Destruction of Books and Libraries in The Twentieth Century, published in 2003), Kluth invites the reader to experience these authors through the lens of suppression.
Knuth goes on several literary and cultural tours to hone her storytelling skills. Additionally, she volunteers at the Highgate Cemetery, burial place of Karl Marx, George Eliot, Malcolm McLaren (manager and promoter of punk rock groups including the Sex Pistols), Douglas Adams (author of A Hitchhiker's Guide to The Galaxy), and many other artists and public figures.
While the main focus of the memoir is her London reinvention, there are many chapters where events from her childhood, teen and young adult years, and professional life are woven within the storyline. This affected the pace and continuity and distracted from the overall narrative, but the chronicle of a personal and professional journey is always best told by focusing on whatever is unique to an individual. For Knuth, home is always there, perhaps in the background, but indelibly etched in our collective souls.
Gretchen Ayoub is a success coach at Massachusetts College of Art and Design and an editor for MicroLit . She was awarded first place in the Writer's Digest annual competition in the Memoir/Personal Essay category in 2023 and Honorable Mention in the Humor category in 2024. Additionally, Gretchen has published essays for the Boston Book Festival At Home Project, Consequence Magazine (book review), and The Tishman Review. She is currently working on a collection of travel essays focused on healing through grief.