In a specialist running shop, Rachel Hewitt was told that the reason there are lots of shoes for men and only a few specifically designed for women, whose bodies need different shoes, is because women running is ‘a really recent thing’, something that began ‘around 1975’, and kit designers are playing catch-up. Questioning these assumptions, Hewitt started to research women as runners and in the outdoors more generally: as hikers, mountaineers and rock climbers. She discovered a harsh truth. There were Victorian women who climbed, hiked, tobogganed, skated and ran before 1975. There are photographs to prove it. But in the early 20th century, as these pursuits became codified and institutionalised, men started to make women feel unwelcome. Pierre de Coubertin, founder of the modern Olympic Games, declared women’s sport to be ‘against the laws of nature’. The Olympic spirit was to be the ‘exaltation of male athleticism … with the applause of women as the reward’.

Some of the photographs were taken by Lizzie Le Blond, an Anglo-Irish ‘lady mountaineer’, author, photographer and filmmaker, as well as the founder and first president of the Ladies’ Alpine Club. Born in 1860, Le Blond was, for one thing, ‘the best-known woman mountain climber of her time’, making ascents in heavy Victorian skirts – which got heavier as they got wetter. She also took her cumbersome camera equipment with her. In the Swiss Alps, she photographed scenes of female athletes roped together, peering down crevasses, sledging and scrambling up ridges. So far from being ‘against the laws of nature’, climbing in the mountains provided mental and physical release for women. Le Blond had been sick with suspected tuberculosis and was first sent to the Alps for a ‘rest-cure’, leaving behind her husband and newly born son. She didn’t look back. There were to be two more husbands but no more children or wifely domesticity (her son was brought up by her mother). The mountains, she wrote, knocked from her ‘the shackles of conventionality’, and she was grateful. She settled in St Moritz and her chosen companions were the guides who led her up mountains and sport-loving women like herself. She became a keen tennis player, reaching the women’s final of the first Swiss Lawn Tennis Championship in 1895. She took up cycling too – of course she did: in the 1890s cycling did more ‘to emancipate women than anything else in the world’, the women’s rights activist Susan B Anthony declared.

Hewitt weaves Le Blond’s story through her impassioned history of women’s experiences in the ‘great outdoors’. She sets out to solve two puzzles. How could a woman like Le Blond, a prolific writer who was ‘often profiled in women’s magazines’, have become so obscure? And how and why did