9781789145014
9781789143430
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.
“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.
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Reviews
Excerpt
This is a book about women who have, over the past three hundred years, found walking essential to their sense of themselves as women, writers and people. The history of walking has always been women’s history, though you would not know it from what has been published on the subject. Since Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s The Reveries of a Solitary Walker appeared in 1782, walking has been acknowledged as central to the writing of many famous male authors: William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Thomas De Quincey, John Keats, John Clare and others. These writers gained readers in their own time, and have continued to enjoy admiration since, not only for their literary accomplishments but their physical feats: De Quincey estimated that William Wordsworth walked 180,000 miles in his lifetime on what he understatedly described as ‘serviceable legs beyond the average standard of human requisition’. De Quincey himself is supposed to have walked an average of 70–100 miles every week, and Keats covered 642 miles in around two months while touring the Lake District and Scotland in 1818. So closely were Romantic writers’ reputations tied to their pedestrian exploits that walking has come to be held as the ideal means by which a poet can experience ‘the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings’ William Wordsworth considered necessary for composition.
Many have followed: Leslie Stephen, Henry David Thoreau, Friedrich Nietzsche, Emmanuel Kant, Robert Louis Stevenson, Edward Thomas, Werner Herzog, Robert Macfarlane. When these men write about their walking, they look back to earlier male walker-writers; even the most recent accounts of walking, such as Robert Macfarlane’s The Old Ways (2012), refer mainly to other male walker-writers (with just the one exception in Macfarlane’s case: his championing of Nan Shepherd’s prose poetry about the Cairngorms, The Living Mountain). So utterly has writing about walking been dominated by men that Rebecca Solnit has described it, with some bitterness, as a kind of club, ‘not one of the real walking clubs, but a kind of implicit club of shared background’, where the members ‘are always male’. The 2014 reissue of the popular anthology While Wandering: Words on Walking rather proves Solnit’s point: the ‘words on walking’ are male-authored more than 90 per cent of the time; of around 270 entries, just 26 are written by women. Also underlining the validity of Solnit’s claim is Frédéric Gros’ A Philosophy of Walking (2014), which calls exclusively on examples of male walkers; the sole mention of a woman walker occurs, in passing, on the penultimate page. The universality of the title belies the fact that the book itself explores a philosophy of male walking, both in terms of subject-matter and in the pronouns used to describe the person walking – a generalized individual who is labelled throughout as ‘he’. While this is possibly an unfortunate effect of the book’s translation from French – with its gendered nouns – into English, it hammers home the apparent, and seemingly overwhelming, masculinity of walking. In describing Gros’ book in an article for the The Guardian, Carole Cadwalladr notes that ‘it’s an examination of the philosophy of various thinkers for whom walking was central to their work – Nietzsche, Rimbaud, Kant, Rousseau, Thoreau (they’re all men; it’s unclear if women don’t walk or don’t think).’
Women most certainly do walk. And they write about their walking, and their thinking, and have done for centuries. Elizabeth Carter, a clergyman’s daughter from Deal, began a lifetime of roaming as a young girl in the 1720s. Fearless and bold, and an aspiring vagrant, Carter covered thousands of miles of the Kent countryside, frequently alone, but sometimes with a friend, seeking out isolated corners for the quiet contemplation of the philosophical questions she would explore in the published works that later brought her fame, fortune and a reputation as one of the pre-eminent scholars in Britain. Carter wrote about her walks in jolly and chatty letters to her dearest female friends, where she turned sometimes unfortunate misadventures into comic episodes of derring-do. She was rarely deterred by anything the mercurial British weather could throw at her, and particularly relished the extremes of the eighteenth century’s harsh winters (what has since come to be known as the ‘Little Ice Age’). As a young woman, for instance, she wrote in high spirits to a friend in Canterbury how:
In proportion as my sister has mended, I have recovered my spirits, I am now nearly as gay and wild as ever, and want to be flying all over the face of the earth, though this weather something cramps my genius, for I cannot meet with any body romantic enough to take moonlight walks in the snow, and travel as people do in Lapland. If I was happy enough to be in Canterbury, what excursions should you and I make through trackless paths, and enjoy a season that less whimsical folk shudder at.
‘Whimsical’ and ‘wild’ are apt words selected by Carter to describe herself – a woman who longed to be truly itinerant, and aspired to be taken up by a local magistrate for appearing to have no fixed home – and they are words that pepper Carter’s writing about her walking. Freed first by a liberalminded father, and later by her literary wealth, from any need to conform to traditional notions of female propriety, Carter’s most ardent wish – one frequently realized – was to bound ‘from rock to rock like a wild kid’ all the days of her life.
Elizabeth Carter was in no way unique for relishing the contemplative space created by the rhythms of walking, or finding in pedestrianism rich matter for her literary works. Though it is William who enjoys the greater cultural recognition, his sister Dorothy Wordsworth was herself an accomplished and ardent walker who stepped out on an excursion almost every day of her early adult life, and she wrote extensively about the thoughts, memories and creative insights in which her walking played an integral part. She undertook walking tours, initially in the company of her brother and their close friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge, but later Dorothy Wordsworth walked with other women – her sister-in-law Mary Wordsworth, and Mary’s sister Joanna Hutchinson. All three women wrote accounts of their experiences on these trips, though Dorothy’s are the funniest, the most vibrant and the most rigorous in exploring the meaning of walking for her as a writer, as a woman and as a human being. Yet where William Wordsworth’s prodigious ambulations added to his prestige as a poet, Dorothy’s were considered by some to be detrimental to her appeal as a woman:
The greatest deductions from Miss Wordsworth’s attractions, and from the exceeding interest which surrounded her in right of her character, of her history, and of the relation which she fulfilled towards her brother, were the glancing quickness of her motions, and other circumstances in her deportment (such as her stooping attitude when walking), which gave an ungraceful, and even an unsexual character to her appearance when out-of-doors.
De Quincey’s description is indicative of some of the cultural reasons which have tended to circumscribe women’s walking in general, not just Dorothy Wordsworth’s in particular: unfeminine (or, in De Quincey’s terms, ‘ungraceful’ or ‘unsexual’) physical traits, and indeed unfeminine levels of physical activity, were subject to criticism – proper women were not supposed to be physically strong. When walking, De Quincey suggests, Dorothy loses her sex, even her personhood. If she is not a woman, what is she?
What is clear when reading Dorothy Wordsworth’s journals and letters, however, is that neither these cultural prejudices, nor her supposed ‘stooping attitude when walking’, were insuperable barriers to her performing pedestrian feats to match her brother’s: on one fine day in 1794, Dorothy walked with William ‘at her side’ for 33 miles, from Kendal to Keswick via Grasmere, ‘through the most delightful country that was ever seen’. Days later Dorothy Wordsworth wrote to her great aunt Crackenthorpe to counter the latter’s criticism at hearing of her niece’s ‘rambling about the country’:
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.
Dorothy Wordsworth’s response demonstrates that walking was not only of physical benefit to her, but was a matter of personal, and perhaps moral, ‘courage’. To walk was to make use of God-given physical gifts, and was, in a shrewd nod to received ideas of feminine domestic economy, financially prudent. While the reference to physical pleasure might have disconcerted the conservative sensibilities of great aunt Crackenthorpe, Dorothy’s defence of her ramblings indicates the centrality of walking to her physical, emotional and indeed spiritual well-being.
There have been many other such women....
Many have followed: Leslie Stephen, Henry David Thoreau, Friedrich Nietzsche, Emmanuel Kant, Robert Louis Stevenson, Edward Thomas, Werner Herzog, Robert Macfarlane. When these men write about their walking, they look back to earlier male walker-writers; even the most recent accounts of walking, such as Robert Macfarlane’s The Old Ways (2012), refer mainly to other male walker-writers (with just the one exception in Macfarlane’s case: his championing of Nan Shepherd’s prose poetry about the Cairngorms, The Living Mountain). So utterly has writing about walking been dominated by men that Rebecca Solnit has described it, with some bitterness, as a kind of club, ‘not one of the real walking clubs, but a kind of implicit club of shared background’, where the members ‘are always male’. The 2014 reissue of the popular anthology While Wandering: Words on Walking rather proves Solnit’s point: the ‘words on walking’ are male-authored more than 90 per cent of the time; of around 270 entries, just 26 are written by women. Also underlining the validity of Solnit’s claim is Frédéric Gros’ A Philosophy of Walking (2014), which calls exclusively on examples of male walkers; the sole mention of a woman walker occurs, in passing, on the penultimate page. The universality of the title belies the fact that the book itself explores a philosophy of male walking, both in terms of subject-matter and in the pronouns used to describe the person walking – a generalized individual who is labelled throughout as ‘he’. While this is possibly an unfortunate effect of the book’s translation from French – with its gendered nouns – into English, it hammers home the apparent, and seemingly overwhelming, masculinity of walking. In describing Gros’ book in an article for the The Guardian, Carole Cadwalladr notes that ‘it’s an examination of the philosophy of various thinkers for whom walking was central to their work – Nietzsche, Rimbaud, Kant, Rousseau, Thoreau (they’re all men; it’s unclear if women don’t walk or don’t think).’
Women most certainly do walk. And they write about their walking, and their thinking, and have done for centuries. Elizabeth Carter, a clergyman’s daughter from Deal, began a lifetime of roaming as a young girl in the 1720s. Fearless and bold, and an aspiring vagrant, Carter covered thousands of miles of the Kent countryside, frequently alone, but sometimes with a friend, seeking out isolated corners for the quiet contemplation of the philosophical questions she would explore in the published works that later brought her fame, fortune and a reputation as one of the pre-eminent scholars in Britain. Carter wrote about her walks in jolly and chatty letters to her dearest female friends, where she turned sometimes unfortunate misadventures into comic episodes of derring-do. She was rarely deterred by anything the mercurial British weather could throw at her, and particularly relished the extremes of the eighteenth century’s harsh winters (what has since come to be known as the ‘Little Ice Age’). As a young woman, for instance, she wrote in high spirits to a friend in Canterbury how:
In proportion as my sister has mended, I have recovered my spirits, I am now nearly as gay and wild as ever, and want to be flying all over the face of the earth, though this weather something cramps my genius, for I cannot meet with any body romantic enough to take moonlight walks in the snow, and travel as people do in Lapland. If I was happy enough to be in Canterbury, what excursions should you and I make through trackless paths, and enjoy a season that less whimsical folk shudder at.
‘Whimsical’ and ‘wild’ are apt words selected by Carter to describe herself – a woman who longed to be truly itinerant, and aspired to be taken up by a local magistrate for appearing to have no fixed home – and they are words that pepper Carter’s writing about her walking. Freed first by a liberalminded father, and later by her literary wealth, from any need to conform to traditional notions of female propriety, Carter’s most ardent wish – one frequently realized – was to bound ‘from rock to rock like a wild kid’ all the days of her life.
Elizabeth Carter was in no way unique for relishing the contemplative space created by the rhythms of walking, or finding in pedestrianism rich matter for her literary works. Though it is William who enjoys the greater cultural recognition, his sister Dorothy Wordsworth was herself an accomplished and ardent walker who stepped out on an excursion almost every day of her early adult life, and she wrote extensively about the thoughts, memories and creative insights in which her walking played an integral part. She undertook walking tours, initially in the company of her brother and their close friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge, but later Dorothy Wordsworth walked with other women – her sister-in-law Mary Wordsworth, and Mary’s sister Joanna Hutchinson. All three women wrote accounts of their experiences on these trips, though Dorothy’s are the funniest, the most vibrant and the most rigorous in exploring the meaning of walking for her as a writer, as a woman and as a human being. Yet where William Wordsworth’s prodigious ambulations added to his prestige as a poet, Dorothy’s were considered by some to be detrimental to her appeal as a woman:
The greatest deductions from Miss Wordsworth’s attractions, and from the exceeding interest which surrounded her in right of her character, of her history, and of the relation which she fulfilled towards her brother, were the glancing quickness of her motions, and other circumstances in her deportment (such as her stooping attitude when walking), which gave an ungraceful, and even an unsexual character to her appearance when out-of-doors.
De Quincey’s description is indicative of some of the cultural reasons which have tended to circumscribe women’s walking in general, not just Dorothy Wordsworth’s in particular: unfeminine (or, in De Quincey’s terms, ‘ungraceful’ or ‘unsexual’) physical traits, and indeed unfeminine levels of physical activity, were subject to criticism – proper women were not supposed to be physically strong. When walking, De Quincey suggests, Dorothy loses her sex, even her personhood. If she is not a woman, what is she?
What is clear when reading Dorothy Wordsworth’s journals and letters, however, is that neither these cultural prejudices, nor her supposed ‘stooping attitude when walking’, were insuperable barriers to her performing pedestrian feats to match her brother’s: on one fine day in 1794, Dorothy walked with William ‘at her side’ for 33 miles, from Kendal to Keswick via Grasmere, ‘through the most delightful country that was ever seen’. Days later Dorothy Wordsworth wrote to her great aunt Crackenthorpe to counter the latter’s criticism at hearing of her niece’s ‘rambling about the country’:
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.
Dorothy Wordsworth’s response demonstrates that walking was not only of physical benefit to her, but was a matter of personal, and perhaps moral, ‘courage’. To walk was to make use of God-given physical gifts, and was, in a shrewd nod to received ideas of feminine domestic economy, financially prudent. While the reference to physical pleasure might have disconcerted the conservative sensibilities of great aunt Crackenthorpe, Dorothy’s defence of her ramblings indicates the centrality of walking to her physical, emotional and indeed spiritual well-being.
There have been many other such women....
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