In Her Nature: How Women Break Boundaries in the Great Outdoors

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My second bookwas A Revolution of Feeling: The Decade that Forged the Modern Mind, published by Granta in 2017. A Revolution of Feelingis about emotion: it explores how the emotions that we allow ourselves to feel are shaped by our societies, cultures, politics, and languages. In particular, my book is interested in emotional change– radical shifts in how people think and talk about emotion – and I was interested in how this is bound up with dramatic political change. A Revolution of Feelingexplores these ideas in the context of one historical decade: I trace how the 1790s saw the collapse of radical political projects and, with them, the ushering-in of a new way of thinking about emotion. My book tells the stories of five political radicals who began the decade as embodiments of the late enlightenment’s spirit of buoyant optimism, but ended it crushed by disappointment and disillusionment; harbingers of a new cultural attitude towards emotion, defined by pessimism, conservativism and individualism.

My own creative style is essentially collaborative, and draws upon models and source material from a vast range of scholars, archives, disciplines and genres. I hugely value collaboration in terms of both research and dissemination. I was Principal Investigator on the AHRC-UKRI network Women In The Hills, which explores historical and contemporary evidence about the factors that constrain women’s participation in outdoor leisure. Whilst all this is happening Rachael her husband Pete & 3 precious children move from London to the north of England with Mattie the cat. This part of the book was impressively honest & captivating. I spoke about research published in A Revolution of Feeling on the BBC Radio 4 programme Thinking Allowed, on BBC Radio 4’s Start the Week , BBC Radio 3’s Free Thinking, on BBC Radio 3 during a Proms Extra talk on sentimentality, and I wrote about my work in The Guardian and New Statesman, and in academic journals, including Lancet Psychiatry .I spoke widely about A Revolution of Feeling at guest lectures and book festivals. No, because I’m quite bloody-minded and I don’t see why I should be deprived of it. Running is fundamentally important to me, physically and emotionally. My father had been unwell for most of his adult life, with an addiction to alcohol that meant I rarely phoned him after six in the evening, dreading the slurring and repetitions. Finally, his body had given up. He had been having chemotherapy for liver tumours for a year. But in early 2019, a new one is detected: belligerent, fast-growing.A trail-blazing book about women's fights to access the great outdoors - about how running took the author from bereavement to belonging Rachel Hewitt on the Three Sisters stretch of the Lyke Wake Walk. Photograph: Alex Telfer/The Observer But women’s freedom – the freedom to be strong, active and comfortable in our own bodies and to move around the world with curiosity and joy – is incredibly important, and it’s so important to me these days that I try to prioritise it above niggling worries about whether it’s safe for me to go running on a deserted moor. My first book, the best-selling Map of a Nation: A Biography of the Ordnance Survey(London: Granta, 2010) explored how changing ideas about British nationhood shaped the ways in which individuals moved around and imagined British landscape, and it won the RSL Jerwood Award for Non-Fiction and was short- and long-listed for multiple other awards. My second book was A Revolution of Feeling: The Decade that Forged the Modern Mind (London: Granta, 2017), which won a Gladstone’s Library Political Writing residency, and was widely reviewed and acclaimed. A Revolution of Feeling revealed how mainstream attitudes to emotion and gender changed at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and I used group biography and memoir to narrate how five individuals reacted to pronounced alterations in the cultural temperament, from optimism to disappointed resignation. In a review, the author Frances Wilson predicted that my book ‘will change the way we think about feeling.’

My first book,the best-selling Map of a Nation: A Biography of the Ordnance Survey, was published by Granta in 2010. It charted the history of Britain's national mapping agency, the Ordnance Survey, and the lives of the individuals who created the first maps. Map of a Nation explored how conceptions of British nationhood radically changed around the turn of the nineteenth century, and it plotted how such changes reverberated through the ways in which Britons imagined and moved around the country’s landscape. Her second book A Revolution of Feeling: The Decade that Forged the Modern Mind was published by Granta in 2017, [9] and explores the decade of the 1790s through the biographies of five people: poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, philosophers Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, medic Thomas Beddoes, and photographer Thomas Wedgwood. [10] She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2018. [11] [12]

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You can,” I say. “It’s just a matter of building up distance, slowly. And it’s so worth it: I’ve had the best day.” Rachel is the author of In Her Nature: How Women Break Boundaries in the Great Outdoors (Chatto, 2023), which was awarded the Eccles British Library Writer’s Award. Her earlier books were A Revolution of Feeling: The Decade that Forged the Modern Mind(Granta, 2017), which won a Gladstone’s Library Political Writing Residency; and Map of a Nation: A Biography of the Ordnance Survey (Granta, 2010), which won the Royal Society of Literature Jerwood Award for Non-Fiction and was shortlisted for the Galaxy Non-Fiction Awards, the Scottish Book Awards, the Bristol Festival of Ideas Book Prize and BBC History Magazine‘s Book Prize. Brave, brilliant and quietly furious, In Her Nature makes a powerful, original case for women claiming space.’ – Victoria Smith, author of Hags Rachel Hewitt and Ben Anderson were both chosen as BBC/AHRC New Generation Thinkers in the scheme which turns research into radio. I decide to look deeper into the notion that women have only really taken to running since the mid-1970s. But women don’t feature much in bestselling books about running. Covers overwhelmingly bear silhouettes of sleek and honed men’s physiques and women are often invisible inside these books too.

Rachel Hewitt is a writer of creative non-fiction, and lecturer in creative writing at Newcastle University. [1] Education [ edit ] She completed a PhD in 2007 in English literature at Queen Mary University, London, with a thesis on romanticism and mapping titled Dreaming o'er the Map of Things: The Ordnance Survey and Literature of the British Isles, 1747-1842. [2] [3] In 2009, she was awarded a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship, to the Department of English and Drama at Queen Mary. [4] Writing career [ edit ]

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A book of courage, grief, anger, wisdom and fortitude. It demands our attention HERMIONE LEE, author of Virginia Woolf Absolutely. These days, I don’t run fast enough to get that massive endorphin burst that you get from fast running on flat ground. Instead, I get a different kind of joy, which is sensory. At the moment, it’s spring in Yorkshire and it smells amazing. And the light is changing, and it’s beautiful, and there’s this contrast between sometimes vast and expansive views and sometimes just little glimpses of a patch of snowdrops.

She was married to Pete Newbon, a lecturer in Romantic and Victorian Literature at Northumbria University in Newcastle, who died in January 2022. [21] She is a keen runner and has been running since her mid-20s. [22]

In April 2023, she published In Her Nature: How Women Break Boundaries in the Great Outdoors, a book which explores the histories of women's participation in sport and the 'great outdoors', interwoven with a personal memoir about loss. [13] [14] Hewitt was awarded an Eccles British Library Writer's Award in 2018 for this project. [15] Books [ edit ] I am a prize-winning writer of creative non-fiction. My creative projects are unified by the aim of understanding and representing processes of cultural change, and the effects of change on individuals’ lives; with particular recent focus on changes regarding women’s rights and freedoms. My third book is In Her Nature: On Women, Outdoors, and it won the prestigious British Library Eccles Writer’s Award. Using biography and memoir, In Her Nature explores historical and personal moments when women’s freedom in public space becomes curtailed, and I show how these constraints significantly curtail women’s presence in the public sphere, as well as the effects on individual women’s lives.