Wanderers & Way Makers: Walking with Women Writers

 

“... but here, the houses falling away on both sides, they came out on the quay, and the whole bay spread before them and Mrs Ramsay could not help exclaiming, ‘Oh, how beautiful!’ For the great plateful of blue water was before her; the hoary Lighthouse, distant, austere, in the midst; and on the right, as far as the eye could see, fading and falling, in soft low pleats, the green sand dunes with wild flowing grasses on them, which always seemed to be running away into some moon country, uninhabited by men.” –  Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (1927).

A few years ago, I was walking along a wind-blasted stretch of the coastal path in Cornwall with my mother, who made an observation: “Have you noticed how all the solitary walkers who have passed us today have been women walking on their own?” – It was true. Of the handful of walkers whom we had met coming in the other direction, greeting each other amiably as we passed by, trudging purposefully along that rugged clifftop path, miles from anywhere visibly populated by people, the majority had been lone women, or very occasionally men and women who were clearly couples, walking together. It was, in many respects, a curiously heartening fact to notice.

As Kerri Andrews points out in her recent book, Wanderers: A History of Women Walking (Reaktion Books, 2020): “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 Quincy, John Keats, John Clare and others.” Even modern-day writers tend to foreground the writing of other men: “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 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.’”

 

Consequently, the publication this month of Way Makers: An Anthology of Women’s Writing about Walking, edited by Kerri Andrews (Reaktion, 2023), is long overdue. As Andrews writes in the Introduction: “This is the first anthology of women’s writing about walking. It seems remarkable to be writing that in mid-2022, when anthologies of walking pepper bookshelves in hundreds of bookshops, but it is nonetheless true.” Such omissions are not due to a lack of material, as this anthology amply attests, given that it contains 74 pieces of writing by 57 different authors. “Much of it has lain in plain sight,” Andrews observes, citing the centrality of walking to the denouement of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as a prime example. In this anthology, which Andrews has arranged chronologically, there is a mix of both prose and poem ranging through the years from 1746 to the present day. Many of the authors it features are well-known names, such as Dorothy Wordsworth, Jane Austen, Christina Rossetti, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Virginia Woolf, Anais Nin, and, of course, Nan Shepherd. But other names are less well-known or even unexpected (Dorothy L. Sayers?), and this is the quirk of a good anthology in my opinion. It can spark joy through welcome familiarity as much as through its equally welcome opposite, by introducing one to new and hitherto unheard-of writers and their works. Inspiring us, perhaps, to return to old literary friends as much as prompting us to seek out the acquaintance of authors who are new to us and the promise of the world seen anew through their books.

 

Dorothy Wordsworth

But, that said – while anthologies can and definitely do delight in such ways, they can also disappoint as well. When excerpts appear to end just as they are getting going, or when a writer’s poems or passages of prose are presented without any background to lend context or exegesis to better inform the reader, it is not always possible to appreciate or properly understand their significance without the anthologist acting as a guide. In this sense, then I would have liked it if Andrews had given the anthology a longer and more in-depth Introductory essay, or some brief commentary or biographical information at the start of each excerpt. However, happily all is not lost in this respect, because I would very much recommend reading Way Makers as a sequel to, or rather as a twin-tome / companion-compendium to be read in tandem with Wanderers. Reading the two books, one after the other, really helped me to understand more about the writers whom the anthology features, several of whom I knew little or nothing about beforehand. For me, at least, these tended to be the more contemporary writers, some of whom Andrews describes and analyses in Wanderers. Each of the chapters in that book ends with a personal reflection which adds a fresh and interesting perspective on her project to foreground women writers who are also walkers, something similar, I think, would have worked well in Way Makers. 

Wild (2014)

Indeed, without reading Wanderers beforehand, I think I would not have understood or properly appreciated some of the writers whom this anthology presents, for example: – Cheryl Strayed, whose story people might be more familiar with from the recent movie adaptation of her book (published in 2012), starring Reece Witherspoon, Wild (2014). Not having read Strayed’s memoir or seen the movie myself, I found Andrews’ chapter on Strayed’s epic 1,100-mile hike along the Pacific Crest Trail to be fascinating; consequently, I felt kind of sad to find that Strayed is only allotted two and a half pages in Way Makers, while other writers are given both lengthier and multiple entries. Given that Strayed is one of the more contemporary writers included in the anthology, perhaps there were copyright restrictions which came into play here? – But then again, it is certainly far too much to expect of any anthology for it to be exhaustively comprehensive. After all, as already acknowledged, anthologies are best read and appreciated as a judicious selection of material which has been assembled with the aim and intention of prompting us to seek out and expand our own literary compass. As Andrews herself says: “This anthology is a start. May it not be the end.”

Nan Shepherd

Setting my very minor personal quibbles aside, however, this anthology very definitely succeeds in demonstrating how walking is as much for women as it is for men both a creative and a physical exercise. Walking is often an intensely personal act, one which can inspire both feelings of freedom and liberation, as well as danger and fear – particularly for women, in different ways than it does for men. Consequently, there is unfortunately a necessary significance which needs to be highlighted by the simple fact that all the authors in this anthology are women. In writing, and equally in reading about walking we can all share something of the solitary self, and the elements – both literal and metaphorical – which make us simultaneously individual and communal souls. What Kerri Andrews’ shows us throughout the pages of both Wanderers and Way Makers is that there is a rich literary heritage which continues to evolve through generations of women writers who love to walk; an essence which resides within all of us who like to set out on foot purely for the pleasure of walking, whether in open country or in crowded city streets; an essence which these writers have distilled through diaries, letters, poetry, travel guidebooks, and novels. Walking and writing are often allied in the sense that they are both about new ways of seeing:

“This day, to put off the moment of seeing it face to face, I chose to climb first the easy Canisp, which blocks the view; then, grasping the summit cairn firmly, I turned to look at Suilven across the gash of Glen Dorcha. A monster indeed, but at the moment passive. I started up its gentle slopes at the south-east end in sun; but once embarked on the long ridge, down came the mist. Suilven is made up of three humped masses connected by very narrow bealachs; as I came over the top of Meall Bheag, the first hump, I could dimly see the slopes of Meall Meadhonach, the second, but I could not see down to the bealach in between; when I had groped my way down I found that it consisted of one rock, across which you could straddle – a nice place, and by some freak of wind the mist cleared to the south-west as I sat there a minute, and though I could not see the top I had left five minutes ago, I could see the hills of Skye forty miles away.” – Janet Adam Smith, Mountain Holidays (1946).

At the Edge of the Cliff, by Dame Laura Knight

As with Virginia Woolf, writing in 1927, reading an anthology such as this one is somewhat akin to Woolf’s imaginative reflections upon roaming the streets of London in search of inspiration through her observing the lives of other people: “Walking home through the desolation one could tell oneself the story of the dwarf, of the blind men, of the party in the Mayfair mansion, of the quarrel in the stationer’s shop. Into each of these lives one could penetrate a little way, far enough to give oneself the illusion that one could become a washerwoman, a publican, a street singer. And what greater delight and wonder can there be than to leave the straight lines of personality and deviate into those footpaths that lead beneath brambles and thick tree trunks into the heart of the forest where live those wild beasts, our fellow men?” – Or in this anthology’s case, the lives of our fellow women who choose to walk and reflect in writing their personal journeys undertaken on foot. In this respect, Way Makers opens up a wonderful array of horizon-broadening paths which will be of interest, inspiration and enjoyment to anyone who is curious about the nexus that bonds human nature and the world at large through the medium of the written word, a medium which can be both a window and a mirror, inviting us to see the world and ourselves anew.

 

Virginia Woolf

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I would like to thank Fran Roberts and Reaktion Books for very kindly sending me a review copy of Way Makers:An Anthology of Women’s Writing about Walking, edited by Kerri Andrews (Reaktion, 2023).

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