![]() ![]() Solnit reached greater prominence with the essays Hope in the Dark, written in 2003 at the start of the Iraq war, which became a manifesto against political despair, but it was her 2008 piece Men Explain Things to Me that catapulted her into the mainstream, gave rise to the term “mansplaining” (which entered the Oxford English Dictionary in 2014, though the neologism was not hers), made her an idol to a generation of young women and turned her into one of the US’s leading cultural and political commentators. ![]() I first encountered her through her 2000 book Wanderlust: A History of Walking, and her work reminded me of essayists of the 1960s and 70s such as Susan Sontag and Joan Didion, who wove together personal experience, academic research, cultural history and pop culture into a new kind of nonfiction that seemed energetic and flexible enough to encompass any subject and offer new ways of seeing it. T here was a time when Rebecca Solnit was a kind of underground secret, like a cult band you had to seek out in obscure venues and only the cognoscenti knew about hearing her writing mentioned by a new acquaintance meant you knew you’d found a soulmate. ![]()
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