NEW Book REVIEW
Published by Chatto & Windus, £20, hardback
THIS IS A BOOK about loss. The erasure of women’s voices throughout the history of the great outdoors examined within its pages is given a contemporaneous framing through the author’s catastrophic loss of five family members within a year.
For Rachel, a professor and ultrarunner, recounting this trauma and her ensuing vulnerability causes her to lose her sense of belonging outdoors: a safe place she’d previously relied upon during hardship from adolescence into adulthood.
After the death of her stepfather and estrangement from her mother, Rachel is bereft. The aggressions she experiences outdoors – many of which will be familiar to female readers – cut deeply in her bereaved state, and she retreats inside. Online and in libraries and the reading rooms of the Alpine Club, she searches for foremothers for guidance.
She has been told over and over again that she won’t find them in the mountaineering history books. What – or rather who – she discovers, however, is Lizzie Le Blond. In retelling Lizzie’s lost mountain life, Rachel begins to question the narrative.
Alongside Lizzie she learns of a lineage of adventurous women who sought respite from the shackles of their social status.
In her grieving and writing process, Rachel unearths their losses, too: the loss of their freedom outdoors with the obsessive patriarchal codification of sports in the 1900s, the loss of their autonomy under a male gaze threatened by their presence, the loss of their achievements to mountaineering history.
In Her Nature mourns the loss of their voices and rights some wrongs in sharing their stories – but it’s a cautionary tale. Whilst these erasures belong to a different century, they are reflected in our current climate in which each woman must weigh her aspirations agains
