Walking Women Writers

I'm reading two books right now, both on walking, one by Rebecca Solnit, whom I have for the past decade referred to as my Doppleganger, a term that I just learned from Wikipedia is taken from the German (Doppel (double) and Gänger (walker)). Solnit lives in San Francisco and publishes books I always think I should have written, an opinion based on their titles, because I haven't, up until last week, been able to bring myself to read her work. Why? Because she writes the books I think I should have written and, if that weren't enough, we share the same first name. But that isn't it entirely. No. She has beautiful hair. Long wavy blond hair that spills around her face like a waterfall in a sunlit spring.  How is that fair? If she gets the published books, she ought to have to take my mousy straight thin locks.

So after ten years, I made myself download her book Wanderlust: The History of Walking, onto my Kindle. Seemed like less of a book that way. And now I'm 15% into it (that's how Kindles count progress, not by pages but by percents) and am so relieved to find out that while she is very smart, we couldn't be more different in how we see the world, how we write, or even how we walk. I still envy the hair, but she makes some excellent observations about walking. 

After reading one too many sentences like this: "Feminism and postmodernism both emphasize that the specifics of one's bodily experience and location shape one's intellectual perspective," (location 605-10, 8%) I took a break and picked up a used hardbound copy of Geoff Nicholson's The Lost Art of Walking at my favorite local bookstore. Infinitely more entertaining and humble. I like to laugh while I read and he writes with wit. But, he just went through a litany of writers who walk and, with the exception of Wordworth's tag-along sister, Dorothy, who wrote in her journal while her brother traipsed around with her in the Lake's District waxing poetic about daffodils (see poem below), nobody on his list was a woman.

Why?

Where are the walking women writers? Other than Solnit herself, the walkers in her book (so far) also are mainly  of the penile (the adjective for penis, a word derived from the Latin term for tail) persuasion.

If anyone has references for walking women writers, please let me know.


Daffodils by William Wordsworth

I WANDER'D lonely as a cloud

That floats on high o'er vales and hills,

When all at once I saw a crowd,

A host, of golden daffodils;

Beside the lake, beneath the trees,

Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
Continuous as the stars that shine

And twinkle on the Milky Way,

They stretch'd in never-ending line

Along the margin of a bay:

Ten thousand saw I at a glance,

Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced; but they

Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:

A poet could not but be gay,

In such a jocund company:

I gazed -- and gazed -- but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft, when on my couch I lie

In vacant or in pensive mood,

They flash upon that inward eye

Which is the bliss of solitude;

And then my heart with pleasure fills,

And dances with the daffodils.