Tag: Highlands

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Leask — Stepping Westward (2020)

Leask, Nigel. Stepping Westward: Writing the Highland Tour c. 1720–1830. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2020.

Abstract: “Stepping Westward is the first book dedicated to the literature of the Scottish Highland tour of 1720–1830, a major cultural phenomenon that attracted writers and artists like Pennant, Johnson and Boswell, William and Dorothy Wordsworth, Coleridge, Scott, Hogg, Keats, Daniell, and Turner, as well as numerous less celebrated travellers and tourists. Addressing more than a century’s worth of literary and visual representations of the Highlands, the book casts new light on how the tour developed a modern literature of place, acting as a catalyst for thinking about improvement, landscape, and the shaping of British, Scottish, and Gaelic identities. It pays attention to the relationship between travellers and the native Gaels, whose world was plunged into crisis by rapid and forced social change. At the book’s core lie the best-selling tours of Pennant and Dr Johnson, associated with attempts to ‘improve’ the intractable Gaidhealtachd in the wake of Culloden. Alongside the Ossian craze and Gilpin’s picturesque, their books stimulated a wave of ‘home tours’ from the 1770s through the romantic period, including writing by women like Sarah Murray and Dorothy Wordsworth. The incidence of published Highland Tours (many lavishly illustrated), peaked around 1800, but as the genre reached exhaustion, the ‘romantic Highlands’ were reinvented in Scott’s poems and novels, coinciding with steam boats and mass tourism, but also rack-renting, sheep clearance, and emigration.”

See Chap 5: “‘Inhabited Solitudes’: Dorothy Wordsworth and the Legacy of the Picturesque Tour.”

Copy: Library of Congress.

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Andrews — Wanderers (2021)

Andrews, Kerri. Wanderers: A History of Women Walking. London: Reaktion Books, 2021.

Abstract (back cover): “This is a book about ten women who, over the past three hundred years have found walking essential to their sense of themselves, as people and as writers. In a series of intimate, incisive portraits, Wanderers traces their footsteps, from eighteenth-century parson’s daughter Elizabeth Carter – who desired nothing more than to be taken for a vagabond in the wilds of southern England – to modern walker-writers such as Nan Shepherd and Cheryl Strayed. For each, walking was integral, whether it was rambling for miles across the Highlands, like Sarah Stoddart Hazlitt, or pacing novels into being, as Virginia Woolf did around Bloomsbury. Offering a beguiling, alternative view of the history of walking, Wanderers guides us through the different ways of seeing – of being – articulated by these ten pathfinding women.”

Contents: Foreword — Setting off — Elizabeth Carter — Dorothy Wordsworth — Ellen Weeton — Sarah Stoddart Hazlitt— Harriet Martineau — Virginia Woolf — Nan Shepherd — Anaïs Nin — Cheryl Strayed — Linda Cracknell and a female tradition — Coda — Appendix.