Wanderers: A History of Women Walking

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Dorothy Wordsworth - Sister of the celebrated poet William, and equally passionate about walking, in 1818 she made one of the first recorded ascents of Scafell Pike. I think it's both. Social squeamishness is evident in tampon adverts or sanitary towels being filled with mysterious blue liquid (I'd be very worried if something that colour ever emanated from my body), but I think a discussion of the subject in outdoor literature is only surprising to us because we're used to non-menstruating bodies telling the stories. Dorothy’s early and tragic slip into senility cut short her ramblings, and although she didn’t receive due credit for her literary contributions, what she harvested from walking while she could provided the true essence of her life. The governess Ellen Weeton, "found herself frustrated in her ambitions [to walk all over Wales] by anxieties about the social propriety of being a solitary woman on the road". How much of an influence were social attitudes, and notions of feminine propriety, in dissuading Victorian women from walking? 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.

Dorothy cherished her walks with William, the way this joint practice restored their relationship and developed into a strong creative partnership.

In 1818, when Dorothy Wordsworth climbed up to Esk Hause with her friend Mary Barker, some picnic-bearing servants and a local guide, the pre-eminence of Scafell Pike was not yet clearly established. Arriving at the pass, Wordsworth and her party believed the “point of highest honour” to be neighbouring mountain Scafell; Dorothy was disappointed to find the route there too long to complete on an autumn day before dark. Settling for “the Pikes”, it was only after her return home that Wordsworth realised she had accidentally climbed the biggest peak in the land. Her excitement at the achievement came after the fact, but it was to be one of the feats of which she was most proud. 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.’ I cross the burn, follow the lane a little south, wondering where Jessie would have found the next part of her descent. And there, between one burn and the next is a gate and a path marked by a scattered line of brown leaves, leading down between trees. It is unremarked on the map and delights me with the soft secrecy of its way. Here there is soprano birch leaf and the bronzy tenor of the first clusters of oak leaves.” Denn erst die Sprache des Gehens vermittelte ihr ein Verständnis davon, wie ihr Geist funktionierte und dass die physische Welt, durch die sie schritt, eine wichtige Struktur bildete, in die sie ihr eigenes Innenleben auf solche Weise einpassen konnte, das beide sich wechselseitig bereicherten. ...<<

When her race and my re-enactment of it had ended, Nellie Bly and I both shared a profound gratitude for the goodwill shown to us everywhere and a renewed faith in humanity. As she wrote in Around the World in Seventy-Two Days, “To so many people this wide world over am I indebted for kindnesses … They form a chain around the earth.” In this fascinating and unique work, Andrews helps to set the record straight. The women walker-writers she examines illuminate the fact that women have been reaping the benefits of a life well-walked for centuries. Intrepid journalist Nellie Bly circled the world faster than anyone ever had in 1890. She travelled alone, with just a Gladstone bag, and shattered the fictional 80-day record of Phileas Fogg , returning in 72 days after travelling 21,740 miles. The fearless globetrotter had achieved “the most remarkable of all feats of circumnavigation ever performed by a human being,” said the New York World, sponsor of her trip.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. 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 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'.

This is a book about ten women who, over the past three hundred years, have found walking essential to their sense of themselves, as people and as writers. 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).

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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 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). 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.

I’m trudging through a Saharan sandstorm. The wind is so loud I can’t hear Brahim, my guide, who is beside me at the head of our camels. Snot is coursing down my face and bubbling into my mouth under my chech (scarf), which is wound round my forehead and my chin to stop my skin being taken off by the sand. I have ski goggles to protect my eyes. It is so hot, I want to rip my ears off. Ears which are filled with grit and itching horribly from the inside. I am silently cursing Freya Stark, the British explorer born in the Victorian era, who journeyed all over the Middle East and is one of the reasons I am in this hell. I didn’t know when I started in January 2019 that I would be walking through the Covid pandemic Offering a beguiling view of the history of walking, Wanderers guides us through the different ways of seeing – of being – articulated by these ten pathfinding women. 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. Often when I step outside and set off on a walk, I feel I can slough off the cares of the day, the constraints of my current situation; I become someone else on the move. Andrews shares Woolf’s description of this phenomenon:

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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. I discovered through Andrew’s work that my walking is a practice known as pedestrianism, a practice known to yield immense satisfaction and revelation. 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.