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3.0
Wanderers: A History of Women Walking
ByPublisher Description
Offering a beguiling view of the history of walking, Wanderers guides us through the different ways of seeing—of being—articulated by ten pathfinding women writers.
“A wild portrayal of the passion and spirit of female walkers and the deep sense of ‘knowing’ that they found along the path.”—Raynor Winn, author of The Salt Path
“I opened this book and instantly found that I was part of a conversation I didn't want to leave. A dazzling, inspirational history.”—Helen Mort, author of No Map Could Show Them
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.
“A wild portrayal of the passion and spirit of female walkers and the deep sense of ‘knowing’ that they found along the path.”—Raynor Winn, author of The Salt Path
“I opened this book and instantly found that I was part of a conversation I didn't want to leave. A dazzling, inspirational history.”—Helen Mort, author of No Map Could Show Them
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.
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communitiesWanderers: A History of Women Walking Reviews
3.0
“Each chapter explored a different woman through the 19th to 21st century and the way in which walking shaped her writing, a lovely premise.
The book was really successful in clearly defining how women’s experiences were missing from this area of history and the justifications that are often used to excuse this. Some chapters and passages I found really engaging (Nan Shepherd’s fascination with the interior of mountains, Anäis Nin and her walks through Paris being tied to her sexuality and overlayed with past memories of lovers, Virginia Woolf and how she used walking to map the pacing that is so central to her novels).
However the earlier chapters I think were a little lost on me due to my given poor knowledge of the women it focused on (I accidentally called Dorothy William Wandsworth’s sister to my mum). This left me a little untethered to, and thus less interested in these sections.
The writing was also quite hard!!! And it was a lot more of an intense literary analysis than I was expecting. I thought it would be more of a narrative which I’m sure I would’ve (lazily) enjoyed more.”
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