Before the advent of television and the internet, almost everyone in America read magazines. Collier’s, The Atlantic, Harper’s, The New Yorker and their ilk had an insatiable need for freelance writers to fill their prestigious pages, and a stellar period of magazine journalism was born. Although women were underrepresented and undervalued in journalism, three remarkable ones were among the best-known magazine writers and among the best, period: Rebecca West, Martha Gellhorn and Emily Hahn.
Starry and Restless: Three Women Who Changed Work, Writing, and the World by journalist and author Julia Cooke intertwines the peripatetic, unconventional lives of West, Hahn and Gellhorn, who are not exactly forgotten but certainly less recognizable names now than in their heyday. Unfairly, Gellhorn may be best remembered as Ernest Hemingway’s third wife, and West as the mother of H.G. Wells’ out-of-wedlock son.
Propelled by curiosity, ambition and courage, they reported from hot spots all over the world. Gellhorn sneaked aboard a hospital ship landing at Normandy during the D-Day invasion. Hahn was The New Yorker‘s China correspondent until her 1943 repatriation, and she ultimately wrote more than 50 books, including an account of her solo trek across Africa in the early 1930s. West’s life involved less derring-do, but she reported from the pre-World War II Balkans, ran what amounted to an informal refugee hostel at her home in England during the war, and covered the trials of postwar British traitors and a South Carolina lynch mob. You can’t make this stuff up.
Cooke is herself a perceptive writer, evocatively describing the women’s journeys and their complex personalities. They had “appalling and necessary” egos, she writes. But, she argues, they helped change journalism, elevating the joys and terrors of ordinary people over the speeches of politicians.
The women knew each other, more or less. Both Hahn and Gellhorn had close late-in-life friendships with West. West and Hahn ultimately settled into unorthodox marriages; Gellhorn married and divorced twice. They had uneasy relations with their children. Throughout, they were restless, dissatisfied, self-doubting—always leaving, always searching. They were a lot. Were they too much? Opinions will differ, but their work remains an impressive legacy.