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In Her Nature
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  • Published: 28 February 2023
  • ISBN: 9781529908909
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: Audio Download
  • RRP: $36.99

In Her Nature

How Women Break Boundaries in the Great Outdoors

Formats & editions
Audiobook
28 Feb 2023
Paperback
6 Aug 2024
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A trail-blazing book about women's fights to access the great outdoors - and a very personal book about how running through the landscape helped the author in her journey from bereavement back to a sense of belonging

'Heartfelt, passionate, infuriating and often devastating, this book will inspire you to fight for your right to tread your own path' CAROLINE CRIADO PEREZ, author of Invisible Women

When Rachel loses five family members in five months, grief magnifies other absences. Running across moors and mountains used to help her feel at home in her body and the world, but now she becomes painfully aware of her inability to run without being cat-called or followed by strange men, or to walk alone at night without fear. Her eyes are opened to injustices facing women in sport, from men who push her off paths during races, to male bias in competition regulations, kit and media coverage. The outdoors becomes a place of danger, sharpening her sense of the grief women experience - every day, everywhere - for lack of freedom.

Rachel goes in search of a new family: the foremothers who blazed a trail at the dawn of outdoor sport. She discovers Lizzie Le Blond, a courageous Anglo-Irishwoman who scaled the Alps in woollen skirts, photographed fearless women climbing, skating and tobogganing at breakneck speeds, and founded the Ladies' Alpine Club, defying men who wanted the mountains to themselves. Yet after such groundbreaking progress in the late 1800s, a backlash drove women out of sports and public space.

Are we now living through a similar reversal in women's rights or an era of unprecedented liberty? Telling Lizzie's story alongside her own, Rachel runs her way from bereavement to belonging, in a world that feels hostile to women. On the way she's inspired by the tenacious women, past and present, who insist that breaking boundaries outdoors is, and always has been, in her nature.
  • Published: 28 February 2023
  • ISBN: 9781529908909
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: Audio Download
  • RRP: $36.99
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About the author

Rachel Hewitt

RACHEL HEWITT completed her doctoral thesis on the subject of the early Ordnance Survey at the University of London in 2007, and is currently a Leverhulme Research Fellow at Queen Mary, University of London. In 2008 she won the Royal Society of Literature Jerwood Award for Non-Fiction. She lives in Cambridge. Her previous books include Map of a Nation: A Biography of the Ordnance Survey and A Revolution of Feeling: The Decade that Forged the Modern Mind.
RH

Praise for In Her Nature

Rachel Hewitt's writing is always elegant, fierce, intelligent and truthful. No one writes as well as she does about endurance - and survival

HELEN LEWIS, author of Difficult Women

This astonishingly brave, deeply important and emboldening book offers hope and encouragement for women to find freedom and solace in the joyous expanse of the natural world

HELEN CARR, author of What is History, Now?

A book of courage, grief, anger, wisdom and fortitude. It demands our attention

HERMIONE LEE, author of Virginia Woolf

A stunning, raw and powerful book - about grief and putting ourselves back together, about freedom and the fight for it, and about strength and the hunger to test it

TIFFANY WATT-SMITH, author of The Book of Human Emotions

In her Nature reanimates the stories of the past to reveal, brilliantly, the conditions through which women so often have to battle in the present... [it] will make you want to run, and to experience something of the hard-won emotional and physical freedom that Hewitt's prose so movingly evokes

DAISY HAY, author of Dinner With Joseph Johnson

A powerful account of women's strengths and achievements in the mountains

ANNA FLEMING, author of Time on Rock

A life-affirming book about the thrill of exploring the great outdoors, asking why so many women are excluded from running, hiking and mountaineering. It confronts the obstacles we face every day, including violence, assault and the general assumption that we don't belong here; but In Her Nature proves we have a right to run free

NATASHA CARTHEW, author of Undercurrent

Brave, brilliant and quietly furious, In Her Nature makes a powerful, original case for women claiming space

VICTORIA SMITH, author of Hags

An urgent, beautifully written and fiercely important book

HELEN CASTOR, author of She-Wolves

With intimate attention and in beautiful prose, IN HER NATURE moves deftly between the inner life and the great outdoors. Rachel Hewitt shows that not only do women have a history as runners, climbers and adventurers; we also have a right to the outdoors that is as crucial - and fragile - today as it ever was

SARAH DITUM

A vital feminist memoir of life outdoors, underpinned by the depth of historical knowledge that only a true scholar can bring

KATE MALTBY

An urgent, powerful, inspiring book about women making a space for themselves in the macho world of outdoor pursuits-one that reflects on what we risk and what we gain by turning our faces to the wind

CAL FLYN, author of Islands of Abandonment

Insightful, compelling, and rightfully outraged, In Her Nature brilliantly reclaims the hidden histories and contemporary experiences of women running, hiking, climbing, and taking up space in the world. An essential read, as well as a moving, revealing, and empowering one

JON MCGREGOR, author of Reservoir 13

An extraordinarily compelling book that left me seeing with fresh eyes. Blending expert historical storytelling with piercing memoir, Rachel Hewitt leads the reader over moors and mountains on a grand tour of grief, solitude, camaraderie, and women's long struggle to claim the freedom of the outdoors

OLIVER BURKEMAN, author of Four Thousand Weeks

[A] deeply impressive, humane synthesis of scholarship, memoir and rallying cry for women and girls to exercise their right to a place in the world

Alex Clark, Guardian *Book of the Day*

Fascinating... This is a book of limitless curiosity and eloquent passion

The Times

A spectacular achievement... It's beautiful, deeply researched and eye-opening

Critic

Informative, essential reading on women's mountaineering wrapped within a profoundly personal memoir. There is joy amid the anger and hurt Rachel conveys on her journey of personal recovery through recovering the stories of her newfound outdoors foremothers. I'm sure many women will feel seen in these pages. The peaks of joy, the lessons learned during the lows, and the rallying cry for our right to feel safe outdoors will stay with me

Francesca Donovan, The Great Outdoors Magazine

Deft, absorbing and informative

Times Literary Supplement

An urgent tale of survival and subversion

Economist, *Books of the Year*

Wonderfully well researched, and candidly honest, Hewitt openly discusses topics which are often shied away from… this book is thought provoking and compelling

Emily Coates, The Professional Mountaineer

A highly original work… Quietly angry and fiercely feminist, it’s the book I’ve been encouraging everyone to read

Critic, *Books of the Year*