Review: 'Mountains Before Mountaineering' by Dawn Hollis

In her new book Mountains Before Mountaineering, Dawn Hollis sets out to refute what she terms a “ghost theory” that has haunted mountain literature for generations: the notion that pre-modern humans regarded mountains with fear and loathing until Enlightenment and Romantic writers and philosophers taught us to appreciate them. This persistent myth, which Hollis traces to William Wordsworth’s 1844 assertion that no English thinker had written admiringly of mountains before the 18th century, has achieved the status of received wisdom through countless regurgitations and repetitions in both scholarly and popular literature.

Decades of literary scholars - either consciously or unconsciously following in the footsteps of William Wordsworth - had repeated the old canard that the love of mountains was a relatively new feeling.

Hollis’s intervention is both timely and necessary. Our contemporary relationship with mountains, dominated by recreational pursuits like hiking, skiing, and climbing, can blind us to the rich variety of ways in which our ancestors engaged with them. Hollis makes her argument through the writing of from 16th- and 17th-century European thinkers, poets, and travelers, introducing us to a cast of forgotten mountain enthusiasts: Tom Coryate, Jean de Thévenot, Conrad Gessner, and Thomas Churchyard, among others. These figures, though largely obscure to modern readers, provide compelling evidence that mountain appreciation neither began with the Romantics nor required their philosophical framework to flourish.

Hollis’s genealogy of the “ghost theory” itself, presented in the book’s final chapter, emerges as the work’s strongest contribution. She traces how Wordsworth’s territorial claim to mountain appreciation — essentially planting his flag on the summit of this “new” behavior — gained scholarly legitimacy through works like Marjorie Hope Nicholson’s Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory (1959), eventually calcifying into accepted historical fact. Though, I dislike the fact that the book’s most crucial chapter — the genealogy of the “ghost theory” — is its last. This organizational choice feels counterintuitive; the very foundation of Hollis’s argument would have been better served as the work’s point of departure rather than its conclusion.

Yet for all its scholarly merits, the book occasionally loses its footing. Hollis’s frequent diversions into personal anecdotes, informal language, and contemporary concerns — from reflections on book collecting to discussions of NIMBYism and historical methodology — often feel like unnecessary and distracting detours from her central argument. While clearly intended to make the work more accessible to general readers, these informal asides sometimes undermine the intellectual heft of her analysis. Admittedly, this is a criticism of style and not one of substance.

Despite these shortcomings, Mountains Before Mountaineering succeeds in its primary mission: demonstrating that our ancestors’ relationship with mountains was far more nuanced and appreciative than the “old canard” would have us believe. Hollis has produced a valuable contribution to intellectual history that challenges us to reconsider not just how we think about mountains, but how we think about historical attitudes toward nature more broadly. In dismantling this particular “ghost theory,” Hollis invites us to question what other assumptions might be haunting our understanding of the past — particularly those in mountain scholarship.