As a long-term obsessive walker, I should have devoured this book but a recent drop off in my own walking due to health issues and a shortage of opportunities for getting outside made me shy of reading it for much longer than I had intended. I didn’t realise that it was possible to be jealous of others’ rambles before.
Way Makers was published at the beginning of this month and is edited by Kerri Andrews, who is Reader in Women’s Literature and Textual Editing at Edge Hill University, and this volume seems a natural companion to her earlier book ‘Wanderers: A History of Women Walking’.
In her introduction, Andrews observes that it is remarkable, with the plethora of anthologies on walking to be found on bookshelves throughout the land, that this is the first-ever anthology of women’s writing about walking, and points to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as a classic of the genre hiding in plain sight.
The anthology itself covers almost three hundred years, beginning with Elizabeth Talbot in 1746 and ending with Mervyn Glover in 2021. Contemporary writers who have become prominent in ‘wild writing’, like Raynor Winn and Kathleen Jaime are included, alongside those who have been neglected until fairly recently, like the now hugely influential mountain mystic Nan Shepherd, and Charlotte Smith. We also meet those who are well known for writing about the outdoors but have had their work notoriously and unjustly overshadowed by male relatives, such as Dorothy Wordsworth, and very many of those who wrote a lot about walking, like Mary Shelley herself, without everyone noticing- Jane Austen and the Brontes, and Flora Thompson being prominent examples.
Two of the surprises for me were a letter from Gwen John about the perils of being a female itinerant artist In France and the heady recollection of Simone de Beauvoir exploring every inch of land around Marseille. There is poetry too, and sometimes poetic prose, catching the experience of walking, which as this book reveals is more universal than we sometimes think.
In some words of Kathleen Jaime, ‘You are not lost. You followed your map. There is a path- there is always a path through the wood; there has been since the dawn of time.’
A rich and fascinating volume well worth reading.
- Way Makers: An Anthology of Women’s Writing about Walking, edited by Kerri Andrews is published by Reaktion Books (£15.99). To order a copy go to reaktionbooks.co.uk
Ian Tattum
Ian Tattum is a priest in the Church of England who writes occasional pieces about the people who shaped the history of science and human and animal travel-real and fictional.
