ABSTRACT
In her 1886 mountaineering memoir, High Life and Towers of Silence, Elizabeth Le Blond writes of re-visiting places of adventure in her writing: ‘I have derived much enjoyment from the labour of writing [the book], and have felt some of the old pleasure of the excursions come back’ (194). For Le Blond, the Swiss mountains were a therapeutic space where she went to recover from tuberculosis and also a place in which she wrote and remembered her celebrated climbing career. This chapter focuses on Le Blond’s French and Swiss mountaineering texts published between 1883 and 1886 and argues that the peripatetic writing space may be one of memory and therapy and responds to scholarship such as that by Forsdick (2015, 2019) which calls for attention to be paid to the corporeal in writing about mobility. The focus of the chapter will be on the ways in which Le Blond describes the mountain spaces, and through this discussion I suggest that these spaces of bodily recovery were also spaces of inspiration and female empowerment through writing.
