Wanderers

A History of Women Walking

Kerri Andrews

• Publisher: Reaktion Books
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781789145014, 9781789143423
• eBook ISBN: 9781789143430
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Women in History
• Index: History

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. "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 "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 This is a book about ten women over the past three hundred years who have found walking essential to their sense of themselves, as people and as writers. Wanderers traces their footsteps, from eighteenth-century parson's daughter Elizabeth Carter—who desired nothing more than to be taken for a vagabond in the wilds of southern England—to modern walker-writers such as Nan Shepherd and Cheryl Strayed. For each, walking was integral, whether it was rambling for miles across the Highlands, like Sarah Stoddart Hazlitt, or pacing novels into being, as Virginia Woolf did around Bloomsbury. 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.

REFERENCES

Setting Off

1 Thomas de Quincey, The Collected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, ed. David Masson (London, 1896), p. 242.

2 Figures taken from Morris Marples, Shanks’s Pony: A Study of Walking (London, 1959).

3 William Wordsworth, Preface to Lyrical Ballads [1800], ed. Michael Gamer and Dahlia Porter (Peterborough, ON, 2008), p. 175.

4 Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking (London, 2002), p. 123.

5 Carole Cadwalladr, ‘Frédéric Gros: Why Going for a Walk Is the Best Way to Free Your Mind’, The Guardian, www.theguardian.com, 20 April 2014

6 Elizabeth Carter to a friend, n.d., in Memoirs of the Life of Elizabeth Carter, by Montagu Pennington (London, 1809), p. 106.

7 Elizabeth Carter to Catherine Talbot, 24 June 1763, in Memoirs, p. 275.

8 De Quincey, The Collected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, p. 239.

9 Dorothy Wordsworth to unknown recipient, April 1794, in The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Early Years 1787–1805, ed. Ernest de Selincourt, rev. Chester L. Shaver (Oxford, 1967), vol. I, p. 113.

10 Dorothy Wordsworth to Aunt Crackenthorpe, 21 April 1794, ibid., p. 117.

11 Sarah Stoddart Hazlitt, ‘The Journals of Sarah and William Hazlitt, 1822–1831’, ed. William Hallam Bonner, The University of Buffalo Studies, XXIV/3 (1959), p. 208.

12 Ellen Weeton, Miss Weeton’s Journal of a Governess, ed. J. J. Bagley, 2 vols (Newton Abbott, 1969), vol. II, pp. 33–4.

13 Sarah Stoddart Hazlitt, The Journals of Sarah and William Hazlitt 1822–1831, p. 208.

14 Robert Macfarlane, The Old Ways (London, 2012), p. 24.

15 Harriet Martineau, Autobiography, 2 vols (Boston, MA, 1877), vol. I, pp. 1146–7.

16 Virginia Woolf, journal entry for Saturday 27 February 1926, in The Diary of Virginia Woolf, vol. III: 1925–1930, ed. Anne Olivier Bell and Andrew McNeillie (London, 1981), pp. 62–3.

17 Macfarlane, The Old Ways, p. 24.

18 Anaïs Nin, diary entry for 3 August 1937, in Nearer the Moon: From a Journal of Love: The Unexpurgated Diaries of Anaïs Nin (London, 1996), p. 76.

19 Anaïs Nin, diary entry for 19 February 1920, in Linotte: The Early Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1914–1920 (San Diego, CA, 1978), p. 445.

20 Anaïs Nin, diary entry for 7 August 1931, in Linotte: The Early Diary of Anaïs Nin, vol. IV: 1927–1931 (San Diego, CA, 1985), p. 455.

21 Nin, diary entry for 13 October 1927, in Linotte: Early Diary of Anaïs Nin, vol. IV: 1927–1931, p. 25.

22 Nin, diary entry for 3 August 1937, in Nearer the Moon, p. 76.

23 Nan Shepherd, The Living Mountain [1977] (Edinburgh, 2011), p. 4.

24 Cheryl Strayed, Wild: A Journey from Lost to Found (London, 2013), p. 95.

25 Linda Cracknell, ‘Stepping Out, Stepping In’, blog entry for 30 January 2015 on Walkhighlands, www.walkhighlands.co.uk, accessed 22 August 2017.

26 Alexandra Stewart, Daughter...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• Foreword
• Setting Off
• ONE Elizabeth Carter
• TWO Dorothy Wordsworth
• THREE Ellen Weeton
• FOUR Sarah Stoddart Hazlitt
• FIVE Harriet Martineau
• SIX Virginia Woolf
• SEVEN Nan Shepherd
• EIGHT Anaïs Nin
• NINE Cheryl Strayed
• TEN Linda Cracknell and a Female Tradition
• Coda
• APPENDIX
• REFERENCES
• FURTHER READING
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• INDEX