Spanning nearly three centuries, Kerri Andrews's Wanderers: A History of Women Walking focuses on ten women to explore the ways in which their passion for walking shaped their approaches to writing and creativity. Opening with the eighteenth-century scholar and translator Elizabeth Carter, who began her working days with long, predawn treks around the Kent countryside where she spent much of her life, Andrews then progresses through accounts of both canonical and now lesser-known writers. The familiar cases of Dorothy Wordsworth and Harriet Martineau take their place beside accounts of Ellen Weeton, a Romantic-era governess, and of Sarah Stoddart Hazlitt, who walked a total of nearly three hundred miles during two week-long tours of the Scottish Highlands while her husband was arranging a divorce. Turning to the twentieth century, Andrews brings the urban ramblings of Virginia Woolf and Anaïs Nin into conversation with Nan Shepherd's passionate, lyrical account of her excursions into the Cairngorms. Andrews then rounds out the book with two twenty-first century walkers: Cheryl Strayed, whose book about walking the Pacific Crest Trail became both a best seller and the basis of a popular film, and Linda Cracknell, who presents her own walks through various parts of Britain as a form of connection with women who had walked those paths before.

Despite its title, Andrews's book is more a series of case studies than it is a history of changing attitudes toward or practices of walking by women. As energetic and physically resilient as they were, Carter, Wordsworth, and Hazlitt were engaging in a very different sort of activity than was Cheryl Strayed, and Andrews does not attempt to map the social and cultural shifts that permitted Strayed to pursue a far more dramatic physical challenge than could her predecessors. Likewise, while acknowledging the relative privilege that allowed these mainly middle-class women to treat walking as leisure or adventure rather than as a hard necessity of survival, Andrews pays relatively little attention to the ways in which class or gender inflects women's practices as walkers. The chapter on Strayed also seems a little out of place because, as Andrews makes clear, Strayed used her journey to test herself, in a form of challenge or purgation, rather than as the sort of creative engagement between the self and the outer world that Andrews explores in most of her other chapters. The contrast between the ways that Strayed and Shepherd write about the demanding mountain terrain they cover in their expeditions (“walks” seems too gentle a word) is striking: as Andrews makes clear, Shepherd seeks to merge herself into the landscape she is traversing, while Strayed attempts to find herself through overcoming its challenges. It would be interesting to hear more of the differences between the isolated rural walks enjoyed by most of these women and the urban walks of Woolf and Nin. Andrews touches on the challenges of developing a female version of the flâneur, but on the whole, she appears more interested in the often rough, physically demanding country walks undertaken by all her subjects aside from Nin. Andrews also hints at that interest in the vignettes with which she ends each chapter, in which she describes one of her own walks through some of the territory covered by the women she is discussing. These personal codas are generally delightful: sometimes dryly self-deprecating, sometimes lyrical, and, as in the chapter on Shepherd, sometimes fascinatingly introspective, as Andrews explores her uneasiness with the cavernous inner spaces of the mountains that drew Shepherd so strongly. In contrast, her brief accounts of walking in London and Boston (for the chapters on Woolf and Nin respectively) seem relatively disengaged.

The great strength of this book is Andrews's obvious knowledge of and passion for the sort of rural or wilderness walks that attracted most of her subjects. The first half of the book, focusing on the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century women, is particularly engaging and offers a valuable contribution to the literary history of the women of that era. There have, of course, been a number of studies on Romantic-era walking, although none of them focus solely on women. At the same time, women travelers of the era—Wordsworth, Hazlitt, Martineau—have recently been attracting more attention. What Andrews contributes to these discussions is a focus on the sheer physicality of these women's practice of travel. Hazlitt's tour of Scotland, recorded in Journal of My Trip to Scotland (1803), was not, for example, merely a compilation of aesthetic responses to the standard beauty spots of the short Highland tour; she provides, in addition, a vivid picture of the physical demands of walking on the body of a middle-aged woman. Andrews also notes the particular challenges and dangers facing women walkers, from Weeton's awareness of the possibility of robbery to Nin's unsettling encounter with a strange young man and Strayed's confrontation with a pair of threatening hunters. To counterbalance this predictable awareness of danger, she highlights in a compelling manner the ways that women have used walking to build or reinforce connections (particularly in the cases of Wordsworth and Cracknell). The strongest thread running through the book, however, is these women's sheer pleasure and confidence in their own physical strength. Carter is perhaps the most striking in this respect: Andrews quotes a number of joyful letters in which Carter highlights the interconnection of her physical and intellectual energies.

Andrews herself situates her book not just in literary criticism but also in an emerging body of writing on human interaction with the environment, including work by Rebecca Solnit, Robert Macfarlane, and Kathleen Jamie (who provides a brief foreword). This is an ambitious goal, but Andrews manages the challenging task of reaching out both to literary scholars and to a general readership interested in wider questions of women's movement through the natural world.