What’s a woman to do when she wants a change? Where does she turn when the pressures of work, motherhood or societal expectations get too much? The man who goes out for a pint of milk or packet of cigarettes and never returns is a familiar figure, but the woman who abandons her family and commitments and hits the road is rarer and is universally condemned.

Annabel Abbs’s Windswept: Why Women Walk wants us to understand these women – the ones who walked away from their homes, from domestic security or simply what others expected them to do. The ones who went walking in search of something else, freedom, inspiration, consolation. 

The reviewer’s well-thumbed copy

Abbs begins with the story of Frieda Weekley, a thirty-three-year-old mother of three in 1912, who left her professor husband and children for her younger lover, the writer DH Lawrence. Frieda would later marry Lawrence, but Abbs is interested in what happened in between, the summer she left her husband and walked with Lawrence over the Alps to Italy to forge a new life. It’s a fascinating tale of steep mountains, political intrigue, nude sunbathing and the harsh realities of life on the road.

Abbs goes on to explore the walking lives of other significant women artists and writers of the twentieth century in eight carefully-researched chapters. She retraces the footsteps of Simone de Beauvoir, Georgia O’Keeffe, Daphne du Maurier and Gwen John, probing their reasons for walking, and the insights they gathered along the way.

Abbs’s book, however, is more than archival research and intellectual musing. She physically retraces the steps of her subjects in a series of her own hikes across the globe, possibly for some of the same reasons. She wants to experience what she calls the “foot-to-ground” impact of walking that sends “pressure waves” through the body, that oxygenates the brain and stimulates it to adapt to change.

Walking in wild places – the “foot-to-ground” impact of walking stimulates us to adapt to change.

One of her key insights is that the women who traded their old lives for a good pair of walking shoes discovered that the physical process of walking gave them not only a sense of possibility but the mental stamina and resources to enact change. These were women who had reached a point in their lives where they felt they had lost their way – their sense of self, their identity, their freedom – but were able to find it again through walking into the wild, the unknown, the undomesticated spaces.

In the process of walking they were “simultaneously and deliberately preparing themselves for a new path in life”. They were testing their resolve and their ability to be alone. Abbs eventually realises that she is doing exactly the same in her own walks – “ending one life and preparing for another.”

Perhaps this process of entering into a state of not knowing, of being far away from home but also from one’s destination, is a need all humans have. Maybe walking is the physical work that helps us do this. Abbs’s  fascinating book full of insights, but beware, it may give you itchy feet.