Julia Cooke's sharp, insightful third book, Starry and Restless, follows the lives, careers, and connections of Martha Gellhorn, Rebecca West, and Emily "Mickey" Hahn--three pioneering reporters and writers whose work changed journalism and took readers to places few other writers dared go. Cooke (Come Fly the World) draws on each woman's correspondence, plus interviews and their extensive bodies of published work, to paint a nuanced portrait of three women who refused to sit quietly on the society pages, but who also struggled to balance professional and personal success.
Cooke explores her subjects' backgrounds, detailing the early circumstances that inspired in each woman a hunger for storytelling, travel, and independence. In alternating chapters, she takes readers through the careers they built around (and sometimes against) political events and headwinds. This includes accounts of Gellhorn's wartime reporting in Europe and East Asia, West's journeys to Yugoslavia in the 1930s, and Hahn's years in 1930s Nationalist China and then in Japanese-occupied Hong Kong.
Quoting from her subjects' own letters and published pieces, Cooke explores their full range of emotions, including fear, love, elation, loneliness, and occasional insecurity about their work. But she also takes them seriously as practitioners of their craft, praising Gellhorn's daring journeys to various front lines during World War II; West's prolific, genre-crossing work on travel, politics, and family life; and Hahn's persistence in building relationships in Shanghai (which led to her writing a biography of Madame Chiang Kai-shek and her sisters).
All three women pursued love and motherhood alongside their careers, though they shared a determination not to let traditional domestic stereotypes keep them from their work. Cooke relates the joy and the complications they found in marriage, including Gellhorn's tumultuous marriage to Ernest Hemingway, West's uneasy relationship to her role as chatelaine of a country estate near London, and Hahn's relationship with Chinese writer and publisher Shao Xunmei.
Making one's way as a female writer has always carried with it certain challenges, and Cooke is honest about those difficulties and her subjects' dogged attempts to overcome them. She also highlights how Gellhorn, West, and Hahn supported one another, through lunches and letters and professional encouragement. Starry and Restless emphasizes the ways these three women helped shape the popular understanding of major events and conflicts in the mid-20th century--and the ways their lives and work helped set a new standard for female journalists who craved adventure, success, and a good story. --Katie Noah Gibson, blogger at Cakes, Tea and Dreams
Shelf Talker: Julia Cooke's sharp, insightful third book is a nuanced account of three pioneering female journalists and the ways their work helped shape the world.