As Rebecca Solnit, one of the few female writers on the subject of walking, and already discussed in this series for the BRC website, says: ‘Throughout the history of walking…the principal figures had been men.’
In her book Windswept, Annabel Abbs sets out to search for other women, well-known for other reasons but not for their enthusiasm as walkers and in their cases not just local walks but serious excursions to remote and sometimes mountainous rural locations, often alone. As Annabel says in her introduction, ‘I grew up carless. My parents could not drive and steadfastly refused to take lessons. We walked because we had to. But we also walked, daily, for pleasure.’ This book is part memoir and part discussion of the lives of these women and the importance of walking to them; as Abbs also says:
‘These women in order to find minds of their own. They walked for emotional restitution. They walked to understand the capabilities of their own bodies. They walked to assert their independence. They walked to become….this book became as much about tracks of thought as about the tracks worn by female feet.’
One of the most unlikely characters in Abbs’s book is Simone de Beauvoir, the writer, philosopher and long -time friend and companion of Jean-Paul Sartre, who remained bemused by what he described as her ’strange mania for gobbling up kilometres.’
‘The thing is that no-one thinks of Beauvoir as a back-packing hillwalker….although she appeared to be an quintessentially Parisian woman she also loved the outdoors but never made grandiose claims about her walking. From the Italian alps she wrote to Sartre that she ‘ had not a thought in her head apart from flowers and beasts and stony tracks and wide horizons, the pleasurable sensation of possessing legs and lungs and a stomach.’
‘It was when she moved away from Paris to Marseilles with its miles and miles of hiking trails in 1931 at the age of 23 that a passion for solitary rambles and communion with nature took hold of her. Walking in the hills and calanques around Marseilles( not that far from Aix-en -Provence), marked a new turn in her life. Every Thursday and Saturday she left her house at dawn, only returning late in the day. She climbed every local peak, crossed every canyon, clambered in and out of every calanque. She walked alone through dense mists and along lonely ridge lines, bracing herself against the unruly mistral wind, the rain and scorching sun’. De Beauvoir says in her journals: ‘ At first I limited myself to some five or six hours’ walking; then I chose routes that would take nine to ten hours; in time I was doing over 25 miles a day.’
After leaving Marseilles, de Beauvoir began inviting friends to join her on her walks although she still needed to walk alone.
After seven years without hiking due to WW2 in 1946 she left for a holiday in the Dolomites in north Italy for 3 week solitary hike: it was exhilarating. De Beauvior writes:
‘From peak to peak, from one mountain hut to the next, across alps and rocks I walked. Once more I smelled the grass, heard the noise of pebbles rolling down the screes, experienced again the gasping effort of the long climb, the ecstasy of relief when the haversack slips from the shoulders that lean back against the earth, the early departures under the pale sky, the pleasure of following the curve of the day from dawn to dusk.’
De Beauvoir returned from the Dolomites to start work on the most significant book of her life, The Second Sex.