Wanderers: A History of Women Walking

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I rated Wanders a three because it didn't hold my attention throughout the book and felt more like an academic exercise at times.

Offering a beguiling view of the history of walking, Wanderers guides us through the different ways of seeing—of being—articulated by ten pathfinding women writers.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 Wordsworth and her brother, poet William Wordsworth, along with other siblings, were orphaned in 1783 when Dorothy was 12 and William 13, and were subsequently separated. In 1799, well into their twenties, Dorothy and William reunited and walked 70 miles “home,” to the Lake District in England where they were born. They arrived together and happy at their new home, Dove Cottage in Grasmere. 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). Only by placing her body into physical animation did she feel capable of animating her words, of giving life to sentences.’

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 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. 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 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 Helen and Anna discuss why humans are drawn to danger and how we can find freedom in pushing our limits, examining attitudes to women who take risks, particularly once they become mothers, and questioning who their 'body' belongs to. The event will delve into what it's like to be a woman in such a male-dominated world – and the ways in which the climbing community is trying to shift that balance.

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Again, the ten women Andrews explores in Wanderers have their own brand of pedestrianism, and all benefit in significant ways from their practice of 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. 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. 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? 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).Andrews skirts on the surface of the lives of these women, without really getting into any depth about how they lived or with any context to what was happening in the world around them which would have some bearing on their experience as female walkers. More weight is given to analysing their writing, than to their stories. There is a clear absence of a “history” of women walkers too; just a collection of stories written from a small section of society. In Colombo, Sri Lanka, I stayed at the Grand Oriental, the only hotel still standing that she stayed at on her whirlwind tour. When Bly was in Singapore, Orchard Road – now Asia’s most famous shopping street – was a shady lane bounded by nutmeg plantations and orchards. Bly spent Christmas Day in Canton, China (now Guangzhou) touring markets, temples and the more chilling side of the city with its execution ground, lepers’ colony and a jail as harrowing as a torture chamber. To my relief, that sinister side of Canton can no longer be traced. We both rode the historic Peak Tram in Hong Kong, and climbed inside the ancient bronze belly of the Great Buddha in Kamakura, Japan. 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. So far from considering this a matter of condemnation, I rather thought it would have given my friends pleasure to hear that I had courage to make use of the strength with which nature has endowed me, when it not only procured me infinitely more pleasure than I should have received from sitting in a post-chaise – but was also the means of saving me at least thirty shillings.

After devouring Wanderers, I am much more enlightened as to what walking means to me and I am ecstatic to know that I follow in the footsteps of many legendary walker-writers. 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.” There is lots of evidence to suggest that these women took huge pleasure in their physical prowess. It wasn't always about 'beating men', so much as enjoying their own capacity for difficulty. Dorothy Wordsworth for instance writes in 1818 about climbing Scafell Pike with an almost youthful easiness. For others, like Sarah Stoddart Hazlitt, the hardships of walking were about taking control of your own body – choosing what, when and how it suffered. I don't think there was much explicit interest in doing men down, so much as taking pride in what they as individual women could accomplish. 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.” I walk to propel my body, generate ideas, process information and experiences, understand the world and people, and to move in closer to myself.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’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”. As humans, walking defines us. We are the two-legged apes. We walk, and we talk. We are thinking minds – thinking in language, more often than not. The rhythms of our walking and of our thinking are one”(9).