Speculation about Markham has, in fact, outlived the woman by going on 30 years. Her talent was for secrecy, rather than discretion, and the practice of arch silence in the face of the gossip that arced behind her every move like a neon contrail. The book kick-started my girl crush on Markham and inspired me to novelize her life- but I soon learned there were many, many closer-cutting stories she didn't touch on in her book, stories she guarded like a sphinx. In Markham's memoir, West with the Night, first published in 1942, there is a lot of pluck and derring-do in her descriptions of her transatlantic flight and other adventures.

Reeling and humiliated, she scrabbled her way toward precious independence, and by age 18 had become the first licensed female racehorse trainer in Africa, and very possibly the world. When a looming, highly public bankruptcy forced Clutterbuck to sell off his farm piecemeal, the 16-year-old Beryl was offloaded at a price as well (as she would later tell friends), to Jock Purves, a neighboring farmer twice her age. She rode a horse before she could walk, learned Swahili as her first language, and grew into a leggy, complex beauty hardwired to trust animals and the brutal land- scape more than people, and to seek danger lest it seek her first.īut there was more loss to come. Since building a farm out of nothing monopolized Clutterbuck's energy, and Markham's mother Clara very quickly abandoned the family to return to England, Markham became every inch the enfant sauvage, spear-hunting in the bush and in the Mau Forest with her childhood friend Kibii, a Kipsigis warrior-in-training, and testing herself on the thorny edges of her world.

Her father Charles Clutterbuck was a horse breeder and trainer who in 1904 transplanted his family from tame Rutland, in the English Midlands, to 1,500 acres of untouched bush in the Rift Valley, 100 miles upcountry from Nairobi. Through each of its violent moltings, Markham's bit of Africa was never less than her anchor and an argument for living boldly, sometimes on nerve alone. English born, the pioneering aviatrix lived most of her life in the British East African Protectorate, which became the Kenya Colony in 1920 before breaking from foreign rule in 1963, under the leadership of prime minister and president Jomo Kenyatta, to become the Republic of Kenya.

Iconoclasts are born, surely, but more often they come smoking from the forge of highly particular circumstances and (unfortunately requisite) suffering.

Beryl markham books