Bibliofemme Bookclub An Irish Bookclub

An extraordinarily committed war journalist and novelist, Martha Gellhorn (1908-1998) also found the time in her wide-ranging and busy life to become Ernest Hemingway’s second of many wives. And it is for that, rather than her own writing, that she is remembered. A truly ambitious woman, this was a fact that she found intolerable while she was alive and which Caroline Moorehead’s exemplary biography goes a long way towards redressing.

Gellhorn spent her life using her pen in the fight against injustice whether it was in her American homeland during the Depression, risking her life during the Spanish Civil War or covering the fall of Czechoslovakia and the Normandy Landings, the liberation of Dachau and the Nuremberg Trials during World War II. She also reported from China during the China-Japan war (her “honeymoon” with Hemingway in 1941), Vietnam in the Sixties, the Arab-Israeli conflict of 1967, Russia in the Seventies and, at the age of 81, travelled to Panama to write about the US invasion.

Martha Gellhorn: A Life truly is a fascinating biography of an extraordinary woman. The quality and quantity of Moorehead’s research (some of it from never previously viewed documents) is clearly evident yet the reader never feels swamped in her sources. This is partly because she has chosen to use endnotes rather than footnotes, and while slightly irritating to this Historian, it does add to the easy read although you will at times find yourself flicking forward and backward to looking at the references.

Gellhorn was a prickly, assertive and sometimes not very pleasant person and Moorehead doesn’t pull any punches in her depiction of the woman. It is to her credit, however, that Gellhorn never fails to fascinate and this is a biography that is as interesting as the character it depicts.