Just after Christmas in 1930, young Midwesterner Emily “Mickey” Hahn was holed up on a ship to what was then called the Belgian Congo. Her belongings consisted of a suitcase and a contraband gun given to her by a Corsican soldier; she had no travel documents to enter the country. This may seem like the trappings of a spy story. But for Hahn and her contemporaries, Rebecca West and Martha Gellhorn, this was just another day in the life of a reporter.
The lives of these three intrepid journalists and solo travelers come to life in the pages of Julia Cooke’s “Starry and Restless: Three Women Who Changed Work, Writing, and the World.” It offers readers a whirlwind tour behind the headlines and a fresh angle on the origins of literary journalism.
While these women rarely overlapped during reporting assignments, their love of writing, travel, mentorship, and friendly competition united them for seven decades of “bylines and books.” West, born Cicely Fairfield, was active in the British suffrage movement and traveled to Yugoslavia in the late 1930s “to see what history meant in flesh and blood”; Hahn, a free spirit known for her pet gibbons and attendance at high society parties, charted a path through Europe, Congo, and China, eventually becoming The New Yorker’s China Coast correspondent; and the Elsa Schiaparelli-clothed Gellhorn wound her way through the front lines of the Spanish Civil War to the beaches of Normandy on D-Day, filing articles while dodging bombs and an increasingly strained relationship with the writer Ernest Hemingway.
Why We Wrote This
For intrepid journalists and solo travelers Emily Hahn, Rebecca West, and Martha Gellhorn, the love of writing, travel, mentorship, and friendly competition united them for seven decades of “bylines and books.” Julia Cooke’s “Starry and Restless” gives them their due.
The image of the plucky woman journalist entered mainstream culture through plays, movies, and popular adventure novels in the early 20th century. In the United States, tens of thousands of women worked in print from 1930 to 1940, and their numbers doubled in the years following World War II. They were mostly relegated to the “women’s pages,” writing on beauty, cooking, and home affairs; those who covered hard news – such as the plight of factory workers or criminal trials – were labeled “stunt girls” or “sob sisters.”
For West, Hahn, and Gellhorn, breaking away from the women’s section often meant self-funding their reporting trips abroad, securing pay and press credentials when they were already on the front lines. Lessons in steely grit and clever thinking abound in “Starry and Restless,” whether it was fending off the advances of Serbian guides (West), learning the Shanghai dialect and Mandarin to understand political intrigue and high society gossip (Hahn), or stowing away on a ship to France in pursuit of a story (Gellhorn).
“Each of these women was attuned – even culturally trained – to notice different details than men,” Cooke writes. “They peered into corners and pulled up rugs and found different stories.”
By the end of World War II, West was filing dispatches from the Nuremberg trials and traveling to South Carolina, where she covered a lynching trial. Hahn fled Hong Kong with her infant daughter to New York, flush with money after the success of her memoirs. There she awaited news of the imprisoned father of her child: Was he alive or dead? Gellhorn, disillusioned with journalism after the decimation of wartime Europe, pursued fiction writing.
While Cooke offers an overview of the lives and careers of these journalists, Hahn’s rollicking life story seems to upstage that of West and Gellhorn. The sections on the latter two feel somewhat flatter in comparison, though their lives are still interesting to read about and are worthy of attention.
Cooke makes a compelling case that these women shared a commitment to going beyond merely dry, factual reporting.
“The average reader needed help to grasp the movement and significance of events, to help paint facts into bigger pictures,” she writes. The contributions of West, Hahn, and Gellhorn to the emerging genres of creative nonfiction and literary journalism have been overshadowed by male writers such as Jacob Riis and James Agee. Gellhorn is largely remembered for her status as Hemingway’s third wife. And seldom are mentions of West, Hahn, and Gellhorn found in the pages of journalism or writing textbooks.
“Where these women are mentioned, it is in ancillary contexts, as if they made a history of their own rather than competing with men for the same column space,” Cooke writes.
With “Starry and Restless,” perhaps they can be recognized anew.
