Wanderers: A History of Women Walking

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You're right, in some ways being a woman was far from enviable – especially if you lost control of your fertility through marriage. But that doesn't excuse ignoring women's accounts. I think we have lots of inherited ideas about what mountains are, what they are for, and those ideas (mountains are big, scary, dangerous, difficult etc) inflect who we think can, and should, go there. I'm writing at the moment about Dorothy Wordsworth's ascent of Scafell Pike in 1818. 'Mountaineering' as an idea had only been invented in 1802, so she was one of the first mountaineers at all, and yet what she saw there, and what she appreciated about climbing, has only recently been accepted as being of value. Her writing has a lot in common with Nan Shepherd's – and she had to wait thirty years after publication (and another 30 before that) for her words to find their audience. UKHillwalking: The established canon of early walking-writing is overwhelmingly male, and yet you've cited examples in Wanderers of women who equally deserve a place alongside their better known male peers. For instance, you write of Lakeland expert Harriet Martineau: "Recognized in her own time as a walker-writer to rival the Lake poets who put the area on the literary map, it is important we recognize that the map we carry of walking's history is incomplete without her." For most people, I'd bet that history is very much incomplete. What inspired you to undertake this reclamation of the role of women in the literary history of walking? Like Harriet Martineau in the Lake District eighty years before, Kesson found in the hills a new freedom, a release from physical confinement. And like Martineau, Kesson celebrated and internalised this freedom by walking in a place in which life could now expand, so that, in Kesson’s case, she became attuned to the unique ‘rhythm’ of each tree’s susurration. In Wanderers, Andrews has taken ten women as her focus, all of whom have lived within the last 300 years, and who have all ‘found walking essential to their sense of themselves, as people and as writers.’ The blurb declares that Wanderers ‘guides us through the different ways of seeing – of being’. Author Rachel Hewitt wrote in her review of this book: ‘Andrews unearths the forgotten women who have walked for creativity, for independence and self-discovery, to remember, to forget, to escape violence, to aid physical and emotional strength.’

Periods. "By reading accounts of walking only written by men" you say "such matters must rarely, if ever, have assumed any importance in our understanding of what it means to walk." Yet menstruation is the experience of half the world, and any woman who walks will know what it is like to be on her period somewhere inconvenient. So why is Cheryl Strayed seemingly so unusual in giving full voice to this inevitable "embodied perspective of a woman" in her book Wild? Are we all simply too squeamish to bear it, or is this a sign that the female experience of the outdoors, at least as is written, remains subordinate to the male? I opened this book and instantly found that I was part of a conversation I didn’t want to leave. A dazzling, inspirational history.’ Helen Mort, author of No Map Could Show Them Nan’s mountain world taught me the importance of connecting with my surroundings, to take time away from technology and to sometimes just be, because according to Nan, “to know Being, this is the final grace accorded from the mountain”.This was an interesting read about the history of women authors walking as inspiration for their work. Men have traditionally been associated with waking and writing, and the history of women walking, being welcomed into spaces by other women to hear their stories that men could not access, and sharing a different perspective and history of the world has mostly been erased or at least not talked about commonly. Here, among an endless ruin of shattered boulders – which to Dorothy looked like the “skeletons or bones of the earth not wanted at the creation” – lies another world. It is covered, Dorothy wrote, “with never-dying lichens, which the clouds and dews nourish”. Dorothy’s account offers a glimpse of the mountain’s never-ending life, an early example of the attentiveness to detail that characterises much of women’s more recent mountain writing, particularly Nan Shepherd’s.

For most of her married life, Virginia Woolf divided her time between Sussex and London. Her writing makes clear that the very different environments provide by the two locations were equally necessary: too much London risked the kind of ‘over-stimulation’ that could threaten her mental equilibrium, while too much Sussex could lead to feelings of isolation”(171). the omission of women from the literature of walking, can no longer be justified. For women walkers, their literary creativity is bound to walking just as tightly, and just as profoundly as men’s. But women move differently, see differently, and write differently about their experiences. To deny the existence of their accounts is to deny ourselves our own history”(263).Kerri Andrews discusses her book, Wanderers, about ten women over the past three hundred years who have found walking essential to their sense of themselves, as people and as writers.