"and What Became of Your Philosophy then?" Women Reading Walden‪.‬

Examining the inclusion of Thoreau's words in three very different texts, this essay explores the distance Walden provides its readers. In the case of the virtually unknown Katharine Whited, her selections from Walden open a conversational space within a quotation book that was part and parcel of her Adirondack cabin in the woods. Elizabeth von Arnim, situated an ocean away on a German estate, uses Thoreau's words to shape her own unconventional experiment in soul growth. Reading Walden every morning, she consolidates the intellectual space that separates her from the "Man of Wrath" who critiques her world. As Virginia Woolf noted in her centennial tribute to Thoreau, the distance between writer and reader is a fundamental element within Thoreau's writings, an element Woolf herself incorporated in her novels. Walden's advocacy of distance is perhaps Thoreau's best gift to marginalized readers, opening the revolutionary prospect that a markedly different perspective can successfully challenge the dominant one. **********