Malton author Rachel Hewitt on her memoir In Her Nature and how running helps with grief

The collection of digitised photographs, taken in the 1880s and 1890s by the respected mountaineer Lizzie Le Blond, recorded her and friends’ adventures in activities such as climbing, hiking, skating, tobogganing.

Encouraged by the images she found online, Rachel kept on researching and discovered that it was not that women were never involved in such sports, but that their stories hadn't really been told.

“Her photographs just had women everywhere, sportswomen everywhere, playing ice hockey, climbing up really difficult crags, hiking, really strenuous activity,” says Rachel, who lives near Malton in North Yorkshire with her three daughters.

“It was a kind of really miraculous experience coming across (them). It wasn't just one photograph, it was thousands of photographs of women doing these things. And it really demolished the stereotype that I had of Victorian women. I’d sort of thought of Victorian women as being kind of ‘angels in the house’, being sort of reluctant to show an ankle, and here were these incredibly strong, athletic, kind of sweaty women getting this incredible joy from being outside.

“I think for me it was a really important moment because it showed me that women do have a history of belonging outdoors and that, actually, those male-dominated histories of outdoor sport that I'd come across have been wrong.”

Her recently published third book, In Her Nature: How Women Break Boundaries in the Great Outdoors, reappraises those histories, exploring many of those pioneers but also the ways in which they had to fight against misogyny and inequality.

However, while working towards the book, Rachel was plunged into grief when a number of family members died. “Writing about it is a way of coming to terms with the new reality,” she says. “I think this why running has been so important to me. Sometimes you just need things to hang on to that are unequivocally real.”

She adds: “When I’m running, the world is suddenly quite simple. It’s about breathing in and breathing out, and it’s about how my skin feels in the sun, or how my leg muscles feel as I’m running up this hill – and suddenly things feel quite solid again.”

While the memoir explores her life, multiple bereavements and running as her sanctuary, she also describes how she came to feel a sense of grief over women’s exclusion from outdoor activity in a broader way.

While Rachel needed to be outdoors running to help with the physical symptoms of grief, she “seemed to have these few months where there were a number of quite intense experiences of street harassment. And for me, that served to magnify the kind of personal grief, I suppose - that not only had I gone through these personal experiences of grief that made it really necessary for me to be outside, to feel better in my body, but that actually that was being taken away from me as well. That I didn’t have the same freedom or ability to explore outdoors that I needed to in order to feel better, that was being taken away from me.

“And I started to see that as an experience of grief and dispossession that is inflicted on women across the world, really.”

Her book explores the structures that have excluded women from such pursuits.

“The sidelining of women in histories that are told about our sport are part and parcel of a shift that happened in the early 20th century, which is where sport became much more organised than it had been before,” says Rachel, a lecturer in creative writing at Newcastle University.

“So it became shaped by governing bodies, and by rules and regulations, and by competitions.

"Wrapped up in that was the idea that the organisation of sports was to do with the organisation of the male psyche, the male personality, that it was to do with creating regimented, fair, disciplined, organised men who would be statespeople for the future.”

Women were kicked out of sports clubs – the very places which became central to how the history of sport was recoded.

“So obviously, if women aren't allowed to take part in these clubs, or these competitions, they're not being written about,” says Rachel.

Her corrective to this includes women from Yorkshire. There was Edith Slingsby, who is said to have learned to climb at Malham and Ingleborough in the Yorkshire Dales and in 1875 made the first known female ascent of the Glittertinden mountain in Norway. Her sister-in-law Alizon also climbed, and her niece Eleanor co-founded the women's rock-climbing Pinnacle Club.

The Calderdale landowner Anne Lister’s mountaineering in Europe in the 1820s and 1830s is noted, but so, for example, is Emma Sharp, who in 1864 walked 1,000 miles in 1,000 hours at Quarry Gap, outside Bradford, and had to carry pistols to prevent male onlookers chloroforming her to throw the event, reports Rachel.

There are parallels today. “Often where men can't reverse women's rights in some areas - men can't necessarily reverse women's rights in the workplace or in various pieces of legislation - then culture and sport is a place where men can protest against women's authority,” she says, adding: “I’d see the rise in street harassment has been a direct protest against these ‘uppity women’ have made so much progress.”

In Her Nature by Rachel Hewitt is out now.