Reaktion Books Wanderers: A History of Women Walking

Foreword by Kathleen Jamie A Guardian Best Paperback for July 2021 '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 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. In a series of intimate, incisive portraits, 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, alternative view of the history of walking, Wanderers guides us through the different ways of seeing - of being - articulated by these ten pathfinding women. 'If I hadn't read this book already, it would be on my wish list this Christmas!' Scottish Mountaineer '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