Nina Bannett offers a full-length investigation into the literary motif of women walking alone in American women's literature.

Using a historical, thematic, and interdisciplinary approach, Bannett considers how selected American women writers have imagined and represented women's solitary walking, and how this walking both frees and restricts them. By analyzing a wide range of literary texts-including slave narrative, short fiction, novels, memoir, essays, and scholarly writing-Bannett argues that women's solitary walking is not a static feminist metaphor. Danger, empowerment, protest, crisis: women's solitary walking embodies different states of being at different moments.

Moving beyond the flâneuse, Bannett examines women's solitary walking in the West, the South, the city and the suburbs. Considering race, age, and class in addition to geographic diversity and time periods, U.S. Women Writers and Solitary Walking argues that women writing about walking, in fiction and non-fiction, constitutes a type of feminist tradition. The book considers canonical fiction writers including Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Kate Chopin, Mary Austin, Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Connor, and Ann Petry along with newer writers like Jamie Quatro and Lauren Groff. It also examines non-fiction including works by Harriet Jacobs, Cheryl Strayed, Rahawa Haile, and Rebecca Solnit. By following American women writers' footsteps, readers will be able to understand women's solitary walking as a metaphor that is now able to bestow more agency despite its rocky past.