“…like watching a beautiful golden lioness when she walked across the room.”
Beryl Markham, b. 1902 – a glamorous, 6-foot-tall racehorse trainer, professional pilot, writer, and “noted non-conformist.” Raised in Kenya, where she grew up spear hunting and speaking Swahili, Nandi, and Masai, Beryl could not be tied down and went around blazing trails and breaking hearts the world over, including that of the English Prince Henry (romantically), and Ernest Hemingway (professionally), who, after reading her memoir of her solo cross-Atlantic flight, West With the Night, literally wrote to a friend: “She has written so well, and marvelously well, that I was completely ashamed of myself as a writer.”
“You’d likely see that the bulk of the terrain you were about to fly over was bluntly marked ‘UNSURVEYED,’” she once wrote. That could also be about your life, Beryl.
More info about my new fave at Atlas Obscura, as part of their series on female explorers.