As we in the KOTUR offices prepare to kick our work shoes off, slip on our sandals and head off on our lazy summer holidays, our minds turned to women who embodied rather more of a sense of adventure. From foreign correspondents to Aviation pioneers, spys to authors, we’re talking women whose thirst for life and quest for excitement took them on extraordinary, boundary breaking journeys; women who, as we head to laze once again on our sun loungers, we would all do well to remind ourselves of.
Recent inspiration came from a newly released book, The Spy who Loved: The Secret Lives of Christine Granville by Clare Mulley. Telling the story of the remarkable life of Granville, a British Secret agent and World War 2 hero, it got us looking for similar figures in history. Here are our picks for the books to read this summer that might tell you their stories. Theirs are stories of fearlessness and femininity, of boundary breaking in style, stories of inspirational women who crossed frontiers both literally and metaphorically and whose remarkable lives cannot do anything but inspire.
Christine Granville: As told in her biography, Christine Granville was more than just a spy. Polish by descent, this renegade and remarkable woman (thought to be the inspiration for Ian Fleming’s Vesper Lynd,) joined the British intelligence at the outbreak of World War 2. She skied over Hungary and the High Tatras mountain range to regain access to her country before ferrying intelligence out for the British, she parachuted behind enemy lines in France to join the French Resistance movement, saved the lives of countless fellow officers, collected countless lovers along the way and charmed everyone from high command to Gestapo officers as she went, securing the release on one occasion of some fellow agents just hours before they were executed by walking into the local Gestapo office and demanding that they were let go. Awarded an OBE for her efforts, nevertheless after the war she struggled to make a living as a hat check girl and a stewardess on a cruise ship before being murdered by an obsessed former lover in London in 1952. A legend in her lifetime but, until now, largely uncelebrated, hers is a story of guts and guile, of a love of life and sense of adventure put to a higher purpose and deployed under extreme danger.
The Spy who Loved: By Claire Mulley is available on Amazon here http://www.amazon.com/Spy-Who-Loved-Christine-Granville/dp/1250030323/ref=la_B00356CF5O_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1367226183&sr=1-1
Amelia Earhart – The famous aviator was a pioneer, a feminist and even something of a fashion icon. Born in Kansas, the lifelong tomboy took her first flying lesson in 1921 and quite simply, never looked back. The first female to fly solo across the Atlantic, she was an icon of the feminist movement, a supporter of Equal rights, a friend of Eleanor Roosevelt’s and a celebrity in her own lifetime. On July 2nd 1937 Earhart’s plane disappeared on the final leg of her second attempt to circumnavigate the globe as she approached Howland Island never to be found, cutting her life tragically short. Her legend and her inspiration as a feminist icon, however, lives on.
East to the Dawn, The Life of Amelia Earhart is available on Amazon here http://www.amazon.com/East-Dawn-Life-Amelia-Earhart/dp/B002U0KOJ0/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1374570422&sr=1-1&keywords=amelia+earhart+east+to+the+dawn
Martha Gelhorn – A writer, a journalist and generally accepted to be one of the finest War Correspondants of the 20th Century, Martha Gellhorn was known for her sense of adventure, her bravery, her style and her wit. Married for a short while to Ernest Hemmingway (she said she never wanted to be the ‘footnote’ to his life,) hers was a life of European wars, Parisian bars and louche London living, all held against the backdrop of a job covering every major conflict of her lifetime – as she once put it, “I followed the war wherever I could reach it.” From the Spanish Civil War to Vietnam, Gellhorn followed the story mercilessly, blazing a trail for female correspondents the world over, being one of the first to report from the concentration camp Dachau after it was liberated and posing once as a stretcher bearer in order to be able to cover the D Day Landings of World War 2. Sharp, superbly stylish and never, ever shy of an adventure, she lived out her days in London, remaining indomitable until the end, once saying, “Why do people talk of the horrors of old age? It’s great. I feel like a fine old car with the parts gradually wearing out, but I’m not complaining,… Those who find growing old terrible are people who haven’t done what they wanted with their lives.” What she did with hers is quite rightly legendary.
Martha Gellhorn: A Life by Caroline Moorehead is available here http://www.amazon.com/Gellhorn-Twentieth-Century-Life-Caroline-Moorehead/dp/B00AK3FAZC/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1374569669&sr=8-4&keywords=martha+gellhorn
Karen Blixen – ‘I had a farm in Africa,’ may now be thought of as the immortal lines from a film starring Meryl Streep, but their basis is found in the very real and remarkable life story of the author Karen Blixen. Born in Denmark, she migrated to Kenya with her new husband Baron Bror von Blixen Finecke in 1914, where they bought some land and established a coffee plantation. After divorcing her husband in 1925, she continued to run their farm, whilst her affair with the dashing Denys Finch Hatten (later immortalised in the film made of her memoir of the time, Out of Africa,) has become the stuff of romantic legend. In 1931, thanks largely to the Great Depression, Blixen was forced to sell her farm and return home. To this day, the area around it’s location in Kenya is known as Karen. Once home, she became a writer, publishing several books and becoming nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature. It is, however, for her adventures in Africa that she remains best known. Of her journey to that then very far away place she once wrote, “Here at long last one was in a position not to give a damn for all conventions, here was a new kind of freedom which until then one had only found in dreams!” It is for precisely that sense of freedom and not giving a damn for conventions that she is still so celebrated today.
Karen Blixen’s Out of Africa is available here http://www.amazon.com/Out-Africa-Penguin-Modern-Classics/dp/0141183330/ref=sr_1_6?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1374570005&sr=1-6&keywords=karen+blixen
Beryl Markham: This British born adventuress was the first licensed female racehorse trainer in Kenya, the first woman to fly east to west solo over the Atlantic, an eccentric and an author of an unputdownable memoir. Brought up in Kenya by her father (her mother moved back to England a short while after the family’s relocation,) she was a famous beauty, married three times and had famous affairs with the Duke of Gloucester and Denys Finch Hatten (Karen Blixen’s lover.) She learnt to fly in Kenya, working for a while as a spotter for big game hunters on safari before becoming the first woman to gain a commercial pilot’s licence. In 1936 she set out in her plane to cross the Atlantic, crash landing in Canada and falling short of her original New York destination, but nevertheless completing her quest. She lived until the age of 83, training horses for the rest of her career. Her memoirs went on to become a bestselling book. Her story is as gripping today as it every was.
West with the Night by Beryl Markham is available here http://www.amazon.com/West-Night-Beryl-Markham/dp/1578989531
