Christiane Ritter: Why this forgotten feminist nature writer deserves to be celebrated

By Dilip -

In 1933, an Austrian housewife called Christiane Ritter travelled with her hunter-trapper husband to spend the winter in the icy wilderness of Svalbard. Five years later, she published an extraordinary book about how “the peacefulness of nature” affected her. It’s a radical, feminist text that speaks to the disconnection from the rest of nature we are experiencing at unprecedented levels today. It’s hard to believe it was written over 80 years ago.

I read the book before and during a research trip to Svalbard for my book Losing Eden: Why Our Minds Need the Wild. It’s a cult classic in some circles, but it deserves to be more widely known. It proved that women could thrive, let alone survive, in a tough environment like the Arctic tundra. A Woman in the Polar Night is remarkable for a few reasons. First, accounts written by women about hanging out in the wilderness in the early 20th century are hardly two a penny. 

At the time, few women were published, let alone female writers of the landscape. Nature writing by women existed – Susan Fenimore Cooper, Dorothy Wordsworth, Phillis Wheatley and Emily Brontë, for example – but it wasn’t until the 20th century that Nan Shepherd, Rachel Carson and Annie Dillard paved the way for the growing number today...
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https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/christiane-ritter-woman-polar-night-feminist-nature-writer-a9347386.html

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