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 sweeping collection of women’s writing on the wandering path, moving across genres, geographies, and centuries.
 
The follow-up to the celebrated Wanderers, Kerri Andrews’s Way Makers is the first anthology of women’s writing about walking. Moving from Elizabeth Carter’s correspondence with Catherine Talbot in the eighteenth century through to Merryn Glover in the present day, and across poetry, letters, diaries, novels, and more, this anthology traces a long tradition of women’s walking literature. Walking is, for the women included in this anthology, a source of creativity and comfort; it is a means of expressing grief, longing, and desire. It is also a complicated activity: it represents freedom but is also sometimes tinged with danger and fear. What cannot be denied any longer is that walking was, and continues to be, an activity full of physical and emotional significance for women: this anthology is a testament to the rich literary heritage created by generations of women walker-writers over the centuries.