Book review: Force of three intrepid women

By weaving three biographies together in one publication, Julia Cooke has created an all thriller, no filler read

Julia Cooke makes great use of excellent raw materials here, doing justice to women who thrived in what was then a man’s journalistic world

• Starry and Restless: Three Women Who Changed Work, Writing, and the World
• Julia Cooke
• Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $32.00

A good book is meant to temporarily transport you. To some faraway place. To some other time. To somebody else’s life. 

While your head is stuck in the pages of a proper work of non-fiction you become immersed in a different world. 

In  Starry and Restless: Three Women Who Changed Work, Writing, and the World, Julia Cooke manages this in triplicate. 

One minute, you are gambolling through the old, multicultural melting pot of 1930s Yugoslavia alongside the intrepid Rebecca West. 

Next you are jealous of Martha Gellhorn’s adventures covering the Spanish Civil War in Madrid. 

Then you are wondering if you could have pulled off the bravery and cunning of Mickey Hahn reporting from1930s China after the Japanese invaded and became a brutal occupying force.

By weaving their three intrepid biographies together in one publication, Cooke has created an all thriller, no filler read.

A minor quibble. Cooke makes great use of excellent raw materials here, doing justice to women who thrived in what was then a man’s journalistic world. 

Gellhorn is perhaps the best known of the trio, usually through her association with Ernest Hemingway who features in dispatches here, incurring a couple of tasty drive-by swipes. 

Hahn is the most daring in terms of simultaneously producing great work while parenting and seeking out her imprisoned husband amid rationing and other horrors behind enemy lines in wartime. 

But, admitting my own ignorance, West might be the most profound exponent of the non-fiction arts I had never been exposed to,

“Only part of us is sane: only part of us loves pleasure and the longer day of happiness, wants to live to our nineties and die in peace, in a house that we built, that shall shelter those who come after us,” she wrote in Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, her travelogue through the Balkans. 

“The other half of us is nearly mad. It prefers the disagreeable to the agreeable, loves pain and its darker night despair, and wants to die in a catastrophe that will set back life to its beginnings and leave nothing of our house save its blackened foundations.”

This chronicle of the mutual career paths of these women offers a window into the social and cultural history of the first half of the 20th century. 

Moving in the most exalted literary and artistic circles, they led colourful and dramatic lives — West had a scandalous affair with and a son by HG Wells. 

A recurring theme is how each woman refused to let any setbacks or domestic responsibilities thwart their ambition to take their places among the most impressive reporters of the age.

The deeper you go into the stories Cooke tells of how and why these women wrote what they did, the more you long to have been a journalist with this kind of brio in the 1930s and 1940s. 

These extraordinary characters just upped sticks and headed to the Spanish Civil War (Gellhorn), the Nuremberg Trials (West), and newly-independent Taiwan under the rule of the ridiculous Chiang Kai Shek (Hahn). 

Sometimes, they even crossed paths. Witness Gellhorn ending up at a party in Hahn’s apartment in Hong Kong, two globe-trotting writers who had attended the same school yet bumped into each other far from home.

A bit like the women’s careers after they settled down, had children and dealt with affairs of the hearth, the last third of the book is less hectic. 

There is a lot of trawling through the trove of revealing correspondence each left behind. An archive of personal letters is a gift that Cooke exploits fully. 

We discover these outsized characters sometimes struggled with the hum-drum of life back home and the traditional expectations foisted upon mothers of their generation who wanted to work.

When we, as readers, are granted access to the innermost thoughts of writers via intimate letters, one wonders what future biographers will have to go on when chronicling the literary stars of the current age. 

Will they be able to delve into the emails, the DMs on Twitter, the text messages? Perish the depressing thought.

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