Beryl Markham, born on October 26, 1902, in Rutland, was a British aviator who was the first professional woman pilot in east Africa as well as the first person to fly solo across the Atlantic from east to west in1936. She was also a trainer of racehorse, an adventurer and an author of her autobiographical novel West with the Night. Beryl Markham dedicated to flying career all through her life and the focuses in her works were not only on the stunning landscape of east Africa but also on the connections between nature and human beings. Intentionally or not, she has made contributions to feminist movement in the early twentieth century and exemplified the commendable independence and courage of a woman in the patriarchal society.
Beryl Markham was the daughter of Charles Baldwin Clutterbuck, a highly skilled horse trainer and she was born in Ashwell, a village in the…show more content… However, the world was declined during the World War II so that people did not concern the gorgeous view of Arica and Markham’s adventurous life. It just “disappeared under a torrent of war news” (Mortimer, 2009). What is worse, paper distribution system and the reduction of newspaper layout in 1943 gave the novel a heavy blow and diminished its promising future. Although this work did not achieve great success in the beginning, it was rediscovered in the 1980s and became a blockbuster in the literary world. Ernest Hemingway (1942) was deeply impressed with Markham's writing, saying that
She has written so well, and marvelously well, that I was completely ashamed of myself as a writer. I felt that I was simply a carpenter with words, picking up whatever was furnished on the job and nailing them together and sometimes making an okay pig pen. But this girl ... can write rings around all of us who consider ourselves as writers ... it really is a bloody wonderful
