Wanderers: A History of Women Walking

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Though it must have been a minority pursuit, not least by dint of class, it's interesting to speculate how many women might have found time and motivation to walk for pleasure, despite the difficulties, but simply not written about it. Absence of evidence not being the same as evidence for absence, do you think the 18th and 19th Century writers you have looked at here are exceptional in that sense, or are they just the ones we know about for obvious reasons?

Isabella’s footsteps led me over the steep Digar La Pass, she astride a yak and me on foot. I stared across the Shyok River towards the village of Satti at the water’s edge in (what is now Chinese-occupied) Tibet, where Isabella was pitched into a perilous escapade on a scow (wooden ferry) that was being poled and paddled, while rapids propelled them into a hissing and raging gorge. Anaïs Nin - The famously emancipated essayist, diarist and novelist, for whom city walking served as both creative inspiration and escape.

I liked the idea of this book, and I definitely enjoyed some of the chapters - but it isn’t a history of women walking. It is more an analysis of women’s writing on walking. I'm not sure there are grounds yet to claim absence of evidence, because so many of the accounts I've read have been in journals and letters – unpublished and therefore undervalued forms. I think if we were prepared to really trawl through the archives we would find thousands of women who walked – just writing about it to close friends, or noting briefly in their diaries their route – rather than publishing their accounts for a general audience. I found dozens more women I could have written about if the book had been set up slightly different. I'm not sure the ones I focus on are as exceptional as they might appear.

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. Author Kerri Andrews introduces us to ten of these women who walked “despite fear and derision.” In her introductory chapter Setting Off, she explains:Yes they did serve as barriers, but only because we refuse to (and continue to refuse to) see fatherhood and marriage as barriers to men. William Wordsworth was a father, Samuel Taylor Coleridge was a father, but no one discusses how they just left the kids behind with their wives, or how fatherhood might have inflected their decisions about walking. We need to change the debate on this, and to rethink not only what it meant to be a woman walker, but to be clearer sighted about the fact that men also had domestic responsibilities. Wordsworth for instance had to write to earn the money to support his family. His friend Robert Southey, also an ardent walker, had the same duty. But there are no books lamenting the effects of fatherhood. So, I think we need to recognise that personal circumstances affect all people, not just female people. Being male is not gender-neutral, yet the male experience is somehow universal while the female is 'different'. Harriet Martineau - A sociologist, novelist, abolitionist and campaigner for women and the poor in the first half of the 19th Century, who wrote an early (and much-read) walking guide to the Lake District, which she came to know on foot perhaps as well as any writer of her time. For all this richness, though, there has tended to be little discussion of women’s walking as a cultural or historical phenomenon, and less of how women’s experiences as human beings might have shaped their walking and writing, or how their walking or writing might have shaped their experiences as human beings. This is to the detriment of our understanding of what walking has meant, and what it might mean, for all of us”(32). Most women, myself included, do not walk alone after dark if we can avoid it. No matter how unfair this is and how angry it makes many of us, we calculate it’s not worth the risk. But Woolf didn’t always heed these warnings, as she recorded that she “rambled down to Charing Cross in the dark, making up phrases & incidents to write about. Which is, I expect, the way one gets killed”(162). It was a scorching day in June when I climbed Scafell Pike for the first time. The sky was a spectacular blue, and there were dozens, perhaps hundreds, of other people out on the mountain paths leading to and from the great pass at Esk Hause ,which links Borrowdale, Wasdale, Langdale, and Eskdale. Many were heading, like we were, for the summit of England’s highest mountain, and the kudos of having climbed nearly a kilometre above sea level. It was exhilarating to be able even to attempt the ascent. It was only after her return home that Wordsworth realised she had accidentally climbed the biggest peak in the land

In the journals of these walks, Dorothy documented not only the itineraries of her party and her own walking, but the encounters with people and landscapes which proved emotionally and creatively significant…but it was the walking itself that enabled specific and important kinds of understanding about herself and the ways in which connections with other lives might be sustained”(68). 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. Kerri Andrews is Reader in Women’s Literature and Textual Editing at Edge Hill University. Kerri is one of the leaders of Women In The Hills, an Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded project aimed at exploring the factors enabling and inhibiting women’s access to upland landscapes. The project brings together people from all areas of walking, mountaineering, land access and management, to drive change in women’s access and experiences. Woolf certainly saw the phrases and ideas that came to her through walking as some sort of produce of the land: writing then became an act of harvesting the linguistic and visual bounty.’

Books

The status of women in 18th and 19th Century society was not enviable, and perhaps it's only to be expected that over time contemporary women walking, and writing about walking, became sidelined. But even today women seem less prominent in writing about nature and the outdoors, and we still see fewer books and articles by women. Is this gender imbalance something you've noticed, and how much does it bother you? To me, Wanderers sounded like the perfect book to settle down with on a hot summer Sunday, after I had finished my own morning constitutional. It absolutely met my expectations in this regard. Andrews herself is a ‘keen hill walker and member of Mountaineering Scotland’, and her passion for the subject shone through at intervals. I really appreciate that throughout, the curator of these wonderful women quoted so much from their own work. All ten of those chosen are inspiring, and a lot of them challenged conventions in myriad ways. A wild portrayal of the passion and spirit of female walkers and the deep sense of “knowing” that they found along the path.’ Raynor Winn, author of The Salt Path and The Wild Silence For me personally there were 3 particular standout chapters – those on Nan Shepherd, Cheryl Strayed and Virginia Wolf. I am a huge fan of Nan Shepherd’s work and The Living Mountain is a book which I read over and over again, for although she walked in the Cairngorms in Scotland and I walk in the Mournes in Northern Ireland, so much of what she unfolds in her short work resonates with me. She knew her mountains intimately, like friends, and it was that experience Kerri states that was ‘fundamental to her writing’. Kerri goes on to say that: ‘At the heart of Shepherd’s writing is a careful and subtle articulation of the complex interactions between physical movement, introspection and the landscape that create meaning in a human life.’ Kerri’s observations about the lives of the women in her book are equally as poised and intricate as Shepherd’s recordings of the terrain over which she wandered prolifically and with full awareness of the risks involved. Kerri explores the almost mystical aspect to Shepherd’s walking, the urges to ‘run away’ from her writing, the courageousness needed by Shepherd to accomplish the physical feats she writes of in The Living Mountain. Through Kerri’s words we are brought closer to understanding the woman behind the beautiful poetry and books that Shepherd brought to the world and that is such a precious gift. So, it’s not surprising that a good friend recently gifted me Kerri Andrews book, Wanderers: A History of Women Walking.

The violence done to the body of this solitary woman walker has been inflicted entirely by herself, by walking the trail. As such, it is thrilling, not frightening, and there is a sense of pride in Strayed’s account at not only having suffered it, but having endured it – even thrived under it.’ Kerri is an incredibly gifted storyteller and her passion for both walking and telling the accounts of these incredible women is extremely apparent. The entire work reads like a poetic love-story and although it zings with an impressive literary quality, testament to Kerri’s role as Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Edge Hill University, and is well-researched, with ideas unfolded in detail, the scene built so tangibly that you become immersed in the landscape of each woman, it is told with such heart that it always feels accessible and inclusive – quite a feat!

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The stronger walkers in this book seem to have regularly outpaced the men they encounter, and yet often to have met disapproval or patronisation for being women in a man's pursuit. Do you think they would have enjoyed leaving the men in their dust, and would any have felt that this was in some small way one in the eye for the patriarchy (or 19th Century words to that effect)? Ellen Weeton - An ambitious walker of the early 1800s, who recounts a solo ascent of Snowdon, among other adventures, in letters and journals only published long after her death. Nan Shepherd - Free spirited doyenne of the Cairngorms, and author (among other works) of The Living Mountain, a small but beautiful book that has had a profound influence on the contemporary style of nature writing. Being less bloody-minded, women were also pretty adept at managing social attitudes and responsibilities – and finding ways to do what they wanted, or needed to do. Plus, poorer women would have had to walk anyway, with their children and to work. So we also need to remember that our discussion here is inflected by class.