Review of Wanderers: A History of Women Walking

This week is meant to be a book review week, but I’ve been having trouble deciding what to review.

I thought about Amy Lin’s Here After, but it’s so sad and made me cry. I thought about Erin Zimmerman’s Unrooted, but realized I’d already reviewed it here (I also interviewed her for Terrain.org).

I mentally scrolled through my rolodex of recent reads to find one that really grabbed me, and came up with Wanderers: A History of Women Walking by Kerri Andrews. I got it from the library at first, then bought my own copy because I think it will be critical for my next book.

In Wanderers, Andrews tells the stories of ten women walkers across a timeframe of 300 years, from Elizabeth Carter in the 1700s to Cheryl Strayed in the 2000s. In between she talks about Dorothy Wordsworth, Virginia Woolf, Nan Shepherd, and Anaïs Nin, amongst others.

Andrews tethers these women to the present by combining their achievements with her own outings, providing a personal aspect that makes the book all the more compelling.

I have a long list of quotes from the book that I won’t type out in its entirety, but here are a few that caught my eye.

On Dorothy Wordsworth: “…the sensations and thoughts recorded in her writing were evoked by the physical labour of putting one foot in front of another…walking itself…enabled specific and important kinds of understanding about herself and the ways in which connections with other lives might be sustained.” Walking is a way of connecting with oneself and others. I couldn’t agree more.

In the chapter about Ellen Weeton, Andrews inserts her own experience of being alone and afraid on a mountain ridge. “I panicked, fretting that I simply no longer had a body capable of walking this distance, and I wondered how I could get off the hill safely if I had to.” Eventually she identifies specific landmarks that she aims for, a plan that helps ease her fears. She also quotes Ellen Weeton’s: “I choose to go alone, in places unfrequented by those of my own species, that my thoughts, as well as my feet, may ramble without constraint.” I completely understand this sentiment. I hike alone despite the bear warnings (I carry my bear spray and a whistle to announce my presence on the trail). And I think while walking, about books, reviews, this blog, and the nature I’m enjoying. I find interesting things to look at, snippets of beauty on the trail.

In the chapter about Sarah Stoddart Hazlitt, Andrews says “For [her], walking underpinned a feeling of wholeness and completeness—of belonging in the world…there is no situation…that cannot be remedied by walking a little further.” Exactly. Walking–even just being outdoors–is a remedy for so many ills.

Then there was Harriet Martineau, who suffered from an unidentified illness from which she eventually recovered. Andrews notes that “walking became not only the measure by which Martineau gauged her returning vigour, but the means by which she celebrated all that had been returned to her in the restoration of her body to strength: walking was, for Harriet, something wondrous.” Also, “Through walking, Harriet completed her metamorphosis from invalid to outdoorswoman who took, in contrast to the sickly steps across her bedroom, ‘firm and almost manly strides.’” I, too, am trying to change my invalid status by hiking, though in my case I’ll never be cured, but I benefit from the outdoor activity.

As Andrews writes, “There is…a clear relationship between enjoyable walking and productive writing: investing time in the one yields dividends in the other.” I can attest to this. I write notes when I come home from my hikes, and I always have something new to write about even though I’m walking some of the same trails.

Of Virginia Woolf, Andrews writes: “Writing without walking was for [Woolf] inert, dead, ‘inanimate.’ Only by placing her body into physical animation did she feel capable of animating her words, of giving life to sentences.” This is similar to Ellen Weeton’s note that “my thoughts, as well as my feet, may ramble without constraint.”

While most of the wanderers Andrews discusses walk in nature, Anaïs Nin is more of a city walker. As Andrews writes: “It was walking the Parisian streets that enabled Nin’s decision to ‘accept herself,’ and to make a determination to resist the judgements of others upon her pedestrianism, [it] opened up…new possibilities about how she saw herself and how she wished to be seen by others. Walking also helped Nin understand what she sought to achieve as a writer.” There is so much to unpack here, from how Nin was perceived by others and her long term writing goals. Walking does a lot for the walker.

Andrews writes: “For…women walkers, the pedestrian body becomes a conduit through which past, present and future are connected. The physical self is a medium through which time, stories, lives, all intersect.” Yes. This.

Kerri Andrews’s book was a revelation to me because I hadn’t known there were so many women walkers, and the distances they walked and landscapes they traversed were not for the faint of heart in some cases. But it is important to listen to Rebecca Solnit, who says, “There are three prerequisites to going out in the world to walk for pleasure. One must have time, a place to go, and a body unhindered by illness or social constraints.”

I think this is the key message of the book. All of these walking women had the privilege to do so. They were relatively wealthy and comfortably middle class, and healthy (with the exception of Harriet Martineau, though she recovered from her illness enough to walk). It’s a surprise to me that women in history were able to take time away from their ‘womanly duties’ to walk. How many of these walkers were married and expected to keep house for their family? Though this is not explicitly noted in the book, I’m curious to know how these women could be so free and independently wealthy to pursue their walking adventures.

All in all a great read. I’m currently reading Annabel Abbs’s Windswept: Walking in the Footsteps of Remarkable Women which is a good companion book that has more memoir elements.