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The Woods Hole Public Library is excited to partner with the 300 Committee to present a virtual book talk with Scottish author Kerri Andrews on her book Wanderers: A History of Women Walking. Dr. Andrews is a senior lecturer in English literature at Edge Hill University. She has published widely on women’s writing, especially Romantic-era authors, and is a “keen hill walker and member of Mountaineering Scotland” who understands the vicissitudes of long (and high) hikes in the mountains of Scotland and the hills and moors of England. It is a fine blend of scholarship and adventure. 

Her goal in writing this book was to open the subject of writing about walking to women. As she states, “This is a book about women, who have, over the past three hundred years, found walking essential to their sense of themselves as women, writers and people. The history of walking has always been women’s history, though you wouldn’t know it from what has been published on the subject.”

Now it seems time to introduce this book and its author to a wider audience. The Woods Hole Public Library and The 300 Committee (perhaps Falmouth’s greatest proponent of walking) are doing just that. In this talk, Kerri Andrews will discuss the origins of women’s walking for leisure and pleasure, exploring the writing of some of those pioneering women walkers before considering what this might mean for women’s walking in the present day. What does it mean to know of a centuries-old female tradition of walking? What might it feel like to walk with ancestresses, rather than ancestors? What does walking mean to us, now?

 

To register for this discussion, please click here.