A few years ago, at the National Art Gallery in Copenhagen, I found myself face-to-face with an immense painting called A Mountain Climber. Painted in 1912 by the prominent Danish artist Jens Ferdinand Willumsen, it showed a curvaceous Nordic beauty, elegantly dressed in a long, sweeping skirt, form-fitting sweater, brimmed hat, and fashionable cape, one hand cradling the carved end of a long walking stick as a mountainscape rose behind her. But what was a Danish woman—Willumsen’s second wife, a somewhat Nietzschean air about her—doing among the dramatic peaks of the Alps? Was the skirt really the best option for climbing? Were there more female hikers like her? What drew them to such heights? And is anyone else reminded of when Martha Stewart and some other gals from the society pages tackled Mount Kilimanjaro?
For answers—granted, not about Martha—there’s now Mountaineering Women: Climbing Through History, by Joanna Croston, director of the Banff Centre Mountain Film and Book Festival & World Tour. (How’s that for a title?) The introduction is by Nandini Purandare, president of the New Delhi–based Himalayan Club, an organization founded in 1928 under the British Raj.
