Wanderers: A History of Women Walking

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As I returned home via a cooling swim in Styhead Tarn, I pondered the nature of the connection between Dorothy Wordsworth, modern female adventurers, and my own experiences that day. I had, I was certain, trodden where Dorothy had, but was that all? Perhaps, simply in the act of looking as she did, at what was small, close, and apparently inconsequential, I had been able to enter into her vision of the mountain and its inner life. Anaïs Nin - The famously emancipated essayist, diarist and novelist, for whom city walking served as both creative inspiration and escape. 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

Walking and losing herself in the pulse of life provided not only material for Woolf’s stories, but the placing of one foot in front of the other established a forward trajectory, fueling the timely unfolding of her stories and revelatory musings of specific characters: 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)? Pacing – the timing of key moments throughout a text – matters to all novels but in Woolf’s case, the pacing was literal and physical: the plots of her fiction were frequently paced out by the author as she walked. The plots too were, on occasion, driven by pedestrianism, so that Mrs Dalloway’s internal life, for instance, unfolds as she strolls through London”(159). We'd like to think we live in enlightened times, but to what extent are there still similar barriers today? 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.’Sarah Stoddart Hazlitt - Who in the 1820s, during an unpleasant divorce from the essayist William Hazlitt, 'found strength in walking' long distances alone across central Scotland. Dorothy cherished her walks with William, the way this joint practice restored their relationship and developed into a strong creative partnership. The reader of Kerri Andrews’s Wanderers: A History of Women Walking laces her boots and strikes out with ten women who walked, wrote and wrote about walking… [She] shares the rapture of Virginia Woolf’s cry: “Oh the joy of walking!”‘ Laura Freeman, The Critic

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). 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). Think of famous walkers and it’s men like Wordsworth and Keats who likely spring to mind. But that’s only half the story.’ Country Walking Magazine When her brother William married and fathered five children, Dorothy, who lived with them, was forced to take on more domestic duties and childcare, but still tried her best to walk, even with her nieces and nephews in tow. But for a woman “capable of walking alone 40 miles a day, this must have felt inhibiting indeed, but the biggest trial was the curtailment of her walks with William”(78). It's interesting to speculate how empowered women might have come to feel through walking, which is after all a way of literally taking charge of your own destiny. This feeling seems to come out in a lot of the writing quoted in Wanderers. In the course of your research, did you come across anything you might describe as proto-feminist?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.’ Andrews features a wonderful cast of characters… It still feels somehow radical to talk about women ramblers and flâneuses; the sensitive, well-researched portraits in Wanderers rightly begin to redress the balance.’ The Idler 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? 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. I imagine Jessie Kesson stepping from the deadened enclosure and stale air of the mental hospital into this cacophony of sound and the sense of elevation. Coming from a regimented institution with every thought and activity crowded by other lives, this could hardly have failed to provoke her free spirit and to animate her feet in exploration. Perhaps it recalled her to those barefoot walks with her mother and a sense of inhabiting again her wild self.”

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.Kerri Andrews is a writer, keen hill walker and also the general editor of Nan Shepherd’s letters. Here she provides an exclusive edited extract from Wanderers. There’s also 20% discount for Walkhighlands readers. Dazu muss allerdings auch erwähnt werden, dass ich aufgrund von der befristeten Leihfrist dazu gezwungen war schneller zu lesen, als mir lieber gewesen wäre. Ich kann mir sehr gut vorstellen, dass ich mit mehr Zeit einfach nur längere Pausen zwischen den Kapiteln eingelegt hätte um dieses Buch langsamer genießen und verdauen zu können. 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? Offering a beguiling, alternative view of the history of walking, Wanderersguides us through the different ways of seeing ‐ of being‐ articulated by these ten pathfinding women. Kerri is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Edge Hill University. She writes about literary history, particularly untold or forgotten histories, and has published widely on women’s writing. Her book, Wanderers: A History of Women Walking, will be published by Reaktion Books in September 2020. Kerri is also 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.

I walked across the vast undulating plateau, past reindeer herds, to the summits of the highest peaks and to sparkling blue lochs, where, without another soul in sight, I swam naked, just like Nan. I had no place to be and no specific time to be there. I would sleep with the sunset and wake with the sunrise. With no modern equipment I became in tune with my environment. The old clothes enabled me to feel the elements and with no phone for distraction, I was present to observe the smallest details. I sat for hours, doing nothing, just learning to be. 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.’

It is so high up that you feel as if in any moment you might topple into Loch Ness below. They say the loch is bottomless and treacherous, yet, on calm days, it is, as Coleridge writes ‘a painted ocean’. So, it’s not surprising that a good friend recently gifted me Kerri Andrews book, Wanderers: A History of Women Walking. I discovered through Andrew’s work that my walking is a practice known as pedestrianism, a practice known to yield immense satisfaction and revelation.