STARRY AND RESTLESS

Women who defied convention.

Journalist Cooke recounts the lives of three restless, ambitious female writers: Emily “Mickey” Hahn (1905-1997), Martha Gellhorn (1908-1998), and Rebecca West (1892-1983). In alternating chapters, she follows their careers, affairs, marriages, family lives, and, most of all, their relentless travels, as they worked to make names for themselves in a male-dominated field. Their lives intersected with one another and other female writers—Hahn became friends with West; Gellhorn with fellow journalist Virginia Cowles; West with Dorothy Thompson—but those relationships could hardly be called a sisterhood. “Competing journalists,” Cooke notes, “wanted to be compared to men, not to one another.” As correspondents for major publications, each brought a personal perspective to their reporting from Spain, China, war-ravaged Europe, and the U.S. “West,” Cooke writes, “had a thrilling way of layering the historical, personal, legal, and moral into the reported: her observations were so sharp, her style at the very surface of any story. Hahn’s bestselling books, like her reporting, thrummed with curiosity about human relationships: gendered dynamics, sex, friendship, family life. Gellhorn’s elegant sentences trained a reader’s attention, often with an unflinching awareness of injustice, on the people impacted by war.” Domestic life could frustrate them: Gellhorn married and divorced Ernest Hemingway, always straining to go out on her own as a war reporter; she adopted an Italian orphan when she was 41. West had a difficult relationship with her son, the offspring of her affair with H.G. Wells. Hahn advised one of her daughters never to learn to cook or drive a car, lest she be tied down to chores. Each allowed for a “slippery adherence to some feminine norms” while staunchly rejecting those that would quash their determination to succeed.

A lively, sympathetic triple biography.