Straight on Till Morning; The Biography of Beryl Markham

London: Hutchinson, 1987. Presumed First U. K. Edition, Second printing. Hardcover. Very good/Good. xxviii, 408 pages. Appendices. Notes. Bibliography. Index. DJ somewhat worn and soiled, with small edge tears/chips. Slight foxing to board edges. Name of previous owner written in ink on front flyleaf. Bottom corner of front DJ flap price clipped. Mary Sybilla Lovell is a British writer. She was an accountant and company director until she began writing in 1980 following a serious riding accident which left her temporarily disabled. She has written biographies of Beryl Markham, Amelia Earhart, Jane Digby, Richard Francis Burton, Amy Elizabeth Thorpe, the Mitford Girls, Bess of Hardwick and The Churchills. Her book on Markham, Straight on Till Morning, researched and written in under a year, after weeks of interviews with the subject in Nairobi, became an immediate international bestseller when it was published in 1987 and was twelve weeks on the New York Times Best Seller list. She also wrote The Mitford Girls (titled The Sisters in the USA), a biography of the celebrated Mitford sisters. Four of her books have been optioned for films. Her last biography was The Churchills, a biography of the Churchill family from the 1st Duke Marlborough to the present generation, was published in April 2011 in the UK and May 2011 in the U.S.A. Beryl Markham was a remarkable personage who played with African tribesmen when a child and became a famed bush pilot and then a leading racehorse trainer. She became the first person to fly from England to America and her memoir West with the Night has become a classic. Beryl Markham (née Clutterbuck, 26 October 1902 - 3 August 1986) was a British-born Kenyan aviator (one of the first bush pilots), adventurer, racehorse trainer and author. She was the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic from east to west. She wrote about her adventures in her memoir, West with the Night. Markham was the first woman to successfully fly across the Atlantic from east to west. She is often incorrectly described as "the first person" to fly the Atlantic east to west in a solo non-stop flight, but that record belongs to Scottish pilot Jim Mollison. When Markham decided to take on the Atlantic crossing, no pilot had yet flown non-stop from Europe to New York, and no woman had made the westward flight solo, though several had died trying. Markham hoped to claim both records. On 4 September 1936, she took off from Abingdon, England. After a 20-hour flight, her Vega Gull, The Messenger, suffered fuel starvation due to icing of the fuel tank vents, and she crash-landed at Baleine Cove on Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, Canada. In spite of falling short of her goal, After living for many years in the United States, Markham moved back to Kenya in 1952, becoming for a time the most successful horse trainer in the country. Derived from a Kirkus review: Readers will find this a superbly researched, gracefully written, outspoken but not unsympathetic biography. Markham was apparently one of those women who are delightful to read about but immensely daunting to know. Lovell is scrupulous in giving her protagonist her due but is unsparing in relating her frequently bristling personality. The result is an irresistibly engrossing portrait of a woman whose unconventionality dazzled the international sporting, aristocratic, bohemian societies she was a part of for more than 50 years. Markham has now joined Isak Dinesen and Elspeth Huxley as chroniclers of life in colonial Kenya during the first half of the century. Raised in Africa, the daughter of a horse trainer, she married at an early age, quickly divorced, remarried, gave birth to a son. 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. 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 at age 84.