Walking a lonely path: gender, landscape and ‘new nature writing’

‘New’ nature writing in Britain has been praised for shifting the focus of landscape appreciation towards the vernacular, the quotidian and the marginal. However, it has sometimes been accused of being insufficiently critical, and occluding questions of class, race and gender. Noting this, this article considers Carol Donaldson’s On the Marshes – an account of the diverse life of the north Kent marshes – in relation to debates concerning the way that the landscape is both walked and written. It concludes that Donaldson’s book offers a familiar trope of self-discovery via solitude, but that this takes on distinctly political dimensions given her ‘bold walking’ rejects many dominant assumptions about the way that women should experience and relate to nature