When Kerri Andrews found herself frustrated by the lack of recognition in the role women played in the history of the development of walking as an outdoor pursuit she decided to do something about it. John D Burns talks to Kerri about the fascinating story of walking women in her book Wanderers: A History of Women Walking
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.
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.
Find out more about the women writers Kerri talks about
Photo Encyclopaedia Britannica
Elizabeth Carter letters: 4 volumes, but Volume 1 is a good place to start
Dorothy Wordsworth, The Alfoxden and Grasmere Journal (not available digitally, but is in a cheap and accessible edition); also Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland 1803: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/28880/28880-h/28880-h.htm
Harriet Martineau: A Complete Guide to the English Lakes
Ellen Weeton: Her journals are cheaply available in print, but it’s possible to look at digital images of the letters themselves thanks to Wigan Archives:
If people are interested in learning more about women in the outdoors, they can try Women In The Hills, a network examining women’s access to uplands now and in the past.
