Mountains have been firing the imaginations of writers and adventurers for centuries, and Anna Fleming’s debut is the latest addition to a long tradition of literary reflections that includes Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain and Robert Macfarlane’s Mountains of the Mind, both of which have clearly influenced Fleming’s writing.
There has been a vogue in recent years for memoirs by women seeking to immerse themselves in the natural world as a means of overcoming some deep trauma: divorce, addiction, the death of a parent. Fleming’s book has no such heroine’s journey at its heart; she just loves climbing. At one point she mentions the end of a relationship driving her to a more intense focus on her craft, but skates quickly across the surface of her feelings: “Some people turn to drink, I relaxed on the rock.”
