In Her Nature: How Women Break Boundaries in the Great Outdoors

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The young woman behind the bar looks down at my peat-splattered legs and asks: “Have you walked here?” Hewitt R. ‘That Experienced Surveyor, Colonel Mudge’: Romantic Representations of the Ordnance Survey Mapmaker, 1791-1830. Staff Profile - English Literature, Language and Linguistics - Newcastle University". www.ncl.ac.uk . Retrieved 5 February 2020. I’m not here to entertain you,” I say. “Do you have any idea what it’s like to not be able to run down the street in peace?” I wanted to believe there could be a schedule for mourning and that I would have run my way out of it by now My father had been unwell for most of his adult life, with an addiction to alcohol that meant I rarely phoned him after six in the evening, dreading the slurring and repetitions. Finally, his body had given up. He had been having chemotherapy for liver tumours for a year. But in early 2019, a new one is detected: belligerent, fast-growing.

O'Kelly, Lisa (2 April 2023). "Writer Rachel Hewitt: 'Running is fundamentally important to me, physically and emotionally' ". The Observer– via The Guardian. My first book, the best-selling Map of a Nation: A Biography of the Ordnance Survey(London: Granta, 2010) explored how changing ideas about British nationhood shaped the ways in which individuals moved around and imagined British landscape, and it won the RSL Jerwood Award for Non-Fiction and was short- and long-listed for multiple other awards. My second book was A Revolution of Feeling: The Decade that Forged the Modern Mind (London: Granta, 2017), which won a Gladstone’s Library Political Writing residency, and was widely reviewed and acclaimed. A Revolution of Feeling revealed how mainstream attitudes to emotion and gender changed at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and I used group biography and memoir to narrate how five individuals reacted to pronounced alterations in the cultural temperament, from optimism to disappointed resignation. In a review, the author Frances Wilson predicted that my book ‘will change the way we think about feeling.’In one memoir I read about female runners through a heterosexual man’s eyes – as “pretty girls” whom it’s “pretty wonderful to watch” – but there is nothing about women’s own achievements or what running means to us. Another book claims to explore “how running makes us human”, but when the author lists all the reasons that people run, he doesn’t mention motivations that I recognise – such as needing to find myself again after having children. I cannot be – have never been – what my mother seems to want and I cannot seem to give her what she appears to want now Hewitt's first book Map of a Nation: A Biography of the Ordnance Survey was published in 2010 by Granta, [5] and built on her PhD thesis work. Hewitt was awarded a Royal Society of Literature Jerwood Award for non-fiction for this project. A brave, necessary, and, sadly, timely book, In Her Nature examines women’s relationship to the outdoors through the prism of a deeply moving memoir about grief and loss. It reveals the staggering history of women’s systematic marginalisation from public spaces and asks if we are again at a crossroads for women’s freedoms — while also offering us a route to reclaiming our own. Heartfelt, passionate, infuriating and often devastating, this book will inspire you to fight for your right to tread your own path.’ – Caroline Criado Perez, author of Invisible Women An extraordinarily compelling book that left me seeing with fresh eyes. Blending expert historical storytelling with piercing memoir, Rachel Hewitt leads the reader over moors and mountains on a grand tour of grief, solitude, camaraderie, and women's long struggle to claim the freedom of the outdoors OLIVER BURKEMAN, author of Four Thousand Weeks I spoke about research published in A Revolution of Feeling on the BBC Radio 4 programme Thinking Allowed, on BBC Radio 4’s Start the Week , BBC Radio 3’s Free Thinking, on BBC Radio 3 during a Proms Extra talk on sentimentality, and I wrote about my work in The Guardian and New Statesman, and in academic journals, including Lancet Psychiatry .I spoke widely about A Revolution of Feeling at guest lectures and book festivals.

In the event, my stepfather isn’t airlifted to hospital – he dies in an ambulance on the driveway of his home in a village 10 miles south of Cambridge, having developed a pain in his leg while gardening. That is it, I think. Now I have no real family at all. If you look at surveys over the past five years, you’ll see that male hostility to women in the public sphere generally is increasing and I think what happens to women in and around sport is a microcosm of that. I decide to look deeper into the notion that women have only really taken to running since the mid-1970s. But women don’t feature much in bestselling books about running. Covers overwhelmingly bear silhouettes of sleek and honed men’s physiques and women are often invisible inside these books too.No, because I’m quite bloody-minded and I don’t see why I should be deprived of it. Running is fundamentally important to me, physically and emotionally. As a result, she went in search of the foremothers who blazed a trail at the dawn of outdoor sports in the 19th century. During her research, she discovered that all too often women had been pushed to the periphery of outdoor sports and activities. Insightful, compelling, and rightfully outraged, In Her Nature brilliantly reclaims the hidden histories and contemporary experiences of women running, hiking, climbing, and taking up space in the world. An essential read, as well as a moving, revealing, and empowering one.’ – Jon McGregor, author of Reservoir 13 and Lean Fall Stand Everyone is so very sad. My mother and I are like some kind of early Christian diptych of mourning, each of us imploring the other for relief. But I cannot be – have never been – what my mother seems to want and I cannot seem to give her what she appears to want now. This becomes too painful for us both. Rachel Hewitt’s writing is always elegant, fierce, intelligent and truthful. No one writes as well as she does about endurance—and survival.’ – Helen Lewis, author of Difficult Women