How to Author a Walk: Henry David Thoreau’s and Mary Austin’s Regional Narratives of Environmental Learning

Abstract

Over the course of the last decade, Mary Austin has been recanonized as a regionalist woman writer and as an author in the Thoreauvian tradition of American nature writing. As a regionalist, Austin is thought to represent a female dominated branch of realist writing, given over to a feminist celebration of communal ways of life and ”woman’s culture.” A representative instance is her inclusion in the Norton Anthology American Women Regionalists (1992).