Author(s): Kerri Andrews

Culture | Feminism | Travel | Women's Histories

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.

Contents: Setting Off Chapter 1: Elizabeth Carter Chapter 2: Dorothy Wordsworth Chapter 3: Ellen Weeton Chapter 4: Sarah Stoddart Hazlitt Chapter 5: Harriet Martineau Chapter 6: Virginia Woolf Chapter 7: Nan Shepherd Chapter 8: Anais Nin Chapter 9: Cheryl Strayed Chapter 10: Linda Cracknell and a Female Tradition Coda

Review:

 'Andrews features a wonderful cast of characters . . . It still feels somehow radical to talk about women ramblers and flaneuses; the sensitive, well-researched portraits in Wanderers rightly begin to redress the balance.' - The Idler

'The reader of Kerri Andrew's Wanderers: A History of Women Walking laces her boots and strikes out with ten women who walked, wrote and wrote about walking . . . there are some lovely vignettes . . . The book is at its best when imaginatively recreating the sole-tiring, soul-stirring, stomping simplicity of walking alone. Then the reader shares the rapture of Virginia Woolf's cry: "Oh the joy of walking!"' - Laura Freeman, The Critic

Author Biography: Kerri Andrews is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Edge Hill University. She has published widely on women's writing, especially Romantic-era authors, and is a keen hill-walker and member of Mountaineering Scotland.