Wanderers: A History of Women Walking

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Harriet Martineau - A sociologist, novelist, abolitionist and campaigner for women and the poor in the first half of the 19th Century, who wrote an early (and much-read) walking guide to the Lake District, which she came to know on foot perhaps as well as any writer of her time. Kerri Andrews: A combination of bloody-mindedness and disbelief. I was reading Robert Macfarlane's The Old Ways in 2014, and thinking of writing a book about how differently we used to move through the landscape, but nagging away was the appearance in the books I was reading that walking was done by men. I made a note in my journal querying this, and noting to myself to look into women's accounts '(if they exist)' I think I wrote. They most certainly do exist. But every book about walking I read – all by men – dismissed even the possibility that women might have walked, might have enjoyed it, might have found it creative and powerful.

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 As a woman, one of the most precious things about these explorations for me is that I am allowed to do what male explorers can’t. I can spend time with the women of these traditional communities, listen to their stories and reflect them out to the wilder world. It may be broiling hot sitting in a tent beside the kitchen area, baking bread and brewing tea, but it’s where all the best tales are told.Andrews skirts on the surface of the lives of these women, without really getting into any depth about how they lived or with any context to what was happening in the world around them which would have some bearing on their experience as female walkers. More weight is given to analysing their writing, than to their stories. There is a clear absence of a “history” of women walkers too; just a collection of stories written from a small section of society. Dorothy’s early and tragic slip into senility cut short her ramblings, and although she didn’t receive due credit for her literary contributions, what she harvested from walking while she could provided the true essence of her life. I walk to propel my body, generate ideas, process information and experiences, understand the world and people, and to move in closer to myself.

Being less bloody-minded, women were also pretty adept at managing social attitudes and responsibilities – and finding ways to do what they wanted, or needed to do. Plus, poorer women would have had to walk anyway, with their children and to work. So we also need to remember that our discussion here is inflected by class. In Colombo, Sri Lanka, I stayed at the Grand Oriental, the only hotel still standing that she stayed at on her whirlwind tour. When Bly was in Singapore, Orchard Road – now Asia’s most famous shopping street – was a shady lane bounded by nutmeg plantations and orchards. Bly spent Christmas Day in Canton, China (now Guangzhou) touring markets, temples and the more chilling side of the city with its execution ground, lepers’ colony and a jail as harrowing as a torture chamber. To my relief, that sinister side of Canton can no longer be traced. We both rode the historic Peak Tram in Hong Kong, and climbed inside the ancient bronze belly of the Great Buddha in Kamakura, Japan. The shell-like covering which our souls have excreted to house themselves, to make for themselves a shape distinct from others, is broken, and there is left of all these wrinkles and roughness a central oyster of perceptiveness, an enormous eye’”(174). The decision to look at the literary history came from a sense, gained from the books that I was reading, that walking had acquired its cultural significance because of its relationship with writing, especially the Romantic-era writers. And, in part, those writers had acquired kudos because they were powerful walkers. I felt that if I was to disrupt that narrative, which I was increasingly sure was totally wrong, I needed to demonstrate that walking was significant for women writers, too.Freya’s stories of travelling secretly with the Druze in Syria, searching for the Queen of Sheba, and doing her last expedition at 75 fired my young imagination and now, years later, reassure me that we female explorers. have an important contribution to make. Kerri delves deep in her exploration of Woolf and this chapter is so rich in detail and thought that it is mesmerising. She puts into words the way many of us may feel about our connection with walking through her portrayal of Woolf.