Wanderers will give many people a lot of pleasure. It has chapters on ten women from the eighteenth century to the present, walkers who wrote about their walking, lit up by the author's own voice for walking. It has nothing to say about the history of science (why should it?), unless it be thought that human relations with the landscape, which in some sense everyone has, belong to the field. Rather, the book is about writing as the expression of the ‘I’ shaped in the process of walking. It is emphatically about women's writing and sensibility, opposed to the gendered assumptions of the standard account of men's walking from Rousseau to modern mountaineers. Kerri Andrews sharply dismisses Frédéric Gros's Philosophy of Walking (2014) for its masculine pronouns (translated from the French) and portrait of walking as male activity. But Andrews is selective in her own way, since her history is not ‘a history of women walking’ – there is no discussion of pilgrims, migrating peoples, domestics looking for work or beggars, for instance – but an engagement with the literature of modern English-language white women's sensibility. It is ‘a literary history of walking by making visible the previously unacknowledged breadth, depth and distinctiveness’ of women's writing on walking for pleasure (p. 35). It persuasively presents a literature of rich subjective lives, and at times movingly intimate relations with landscape. For me, this is where the philosophical interest lies: the walking, the motion with a certain speed and rhythm, the movement, relates person and world in a way that the image of the objective, static, visual observer does not. (In a sociologist of knowledge like Andrew Pickering, though, we can find a portrait of the experimental scientist as ‘choreographer’ of moving relations with the world.) Writing, Andrews seeks empathy, ways to capture the written record of knowledge gained by women through the feet. She is, of course, sensitive to movement meaning freedom. But for her (unlike Gros) this is a sensibility emptied of political reference, a matter of the distinct ‘I’ of women shaping a place for themselves.

It is the nature of the project that the author's walkers must be writers. Her first subject, Elizabeth Carter, a parson's daughter, who also shared the London winter social scene, roamed the countryside near Deal in Kent, at all times of day and night in the 1720s and later, irrepressibly ‘wild’. A chapter appropriately asserts the significance of Dorothy Wordsworth's walking, alongside and later independently of her brother. Walking in the Lake District is also represented by Ellen Weeton and by Harriet Martineau, with whom walking became almost a kind of sociological method. Scotland also has an important place, with Sarah Stoddart Hazlitt in the nineteenth century and Nan Shepherd in the twentieth. Both Hazlitt and Weeton walked alone to find freedom, escaping from the pain of relationships with men. Shepherd's intimacy with the Cairngorms massif, which she knew all her life, the massif seen as so forbidding by other people, must count among the most loving relationships known by movement. In marked contrast, there are chapters on Virginia Woolf and Anaïs Nin, city walkers (though Woolf also walked in her beloved Sussex), both composers of what they wanted to say on their feet. Perhaps because Andrews so strongly seeks to portray the distinctiveness of women's sensibility, she makes no reference to Woolf's father, famous as a walker and alpinist, even though at least one other literary scholar, Catherine W. Hollis, has also used the phrase, from Leslie Stephen, that Andrews draws on (p. 181), that ‘there's little to indicate where the human ends, and the mountain world begins’. Contemporary women's writing on walking is represented by Cheryl Strayed (who foolishly and courageously undertook alone the great Pacific Crest trail in North America, seeking, as so many walkers do, to purify a life) and Linda Cracknell, preoccupied by walking in the steps of the past, reconstructing history. A helpful appendix lists other women who might have been included.

The writing is eminently readable (though I felt in places a didactic spelling out of what had already been said in quotations) and rich in sensibility. Certainly, women walkers are on the map, on the move, and have the world at their feet.