STRAIGHT ON TILL MORNING: The Biography of Beryl Markham

by Mary S. Lovell ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 24, 1987

A female acquaintance of Beryl Markham's once said, ""She had charm, but no warmth."" Furthermore, she added, the horsewoman-aviatrix-writer ""was completely amoral."" Readers of this superbly researched, gracefully written, outspoken but not unsympathetic biography may feel that description was a model of British understatement. Markham was apparently, at least from the evidence here, one of those women who are delightful to read about but immensely daunting to know. Lover is scrupulous in giving her protagonist her due but is unsparing in relating her ""amorality"" and her frequently bristling personality. The result is an irresistibly engrossing portrait of a woman whose unconventionality dazzled (and often outraged) the international sporting, aristocratic, bohemian societies she was a part of for more than 50 years. With the re-publication of her memoirs West With the Night and the book's subsequent immense popularity, Markham has now joined Isak Dinesen and Elspeth Huxley as chroniclers of life in colonial Kenya during the first half of the century. Rased in Africa, the daughter of a horse trainer, she married at an early age, quickly divorced, remarried, gave birth to a son, whose father may or may not have been her husband. Abandoning her family, she became first a successful trainer like her father, then a bush pilot scouting for big-game hunters; eventually she undertook an east-west solo flight across the Atlantic, thus becoming a feted and flattered world celebrity. Markham adored it all. Highly promiscuous, she could claim scores of lovers, ranging from Prince Henry, Duke of Gloucester, to Denys Finch-Hatton, whose love Isak Dinesen celebrated in Out of Africa. After a life that alternated between the glamorous and the grubby, the passionate and the pathetic, she died last year, age 84. A television mini-series of Markham's life is scheduled. Dynasty's Alexis Carrington is in for some stiff competition.

Pub Date: Sept. 24, 1987

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1987

Categories: NONFICTION