Friday, October 21, 2022

Beryl Markham on Life in the Bottomless Night

Beryl was friends with Baroness Blixen and Denys Finch-Hatton. In the film Out of Africa she was depicted as the character "Felicity." From The Marginalian:

“For a moment of night,” Henry Beston wrote in his exquisite century-old love letter to darkness, “we have a glimpse of ourselves and of our world islanded in its stream of stars — pilgrims of mortality, voyaging between horizons across eternal seas of space and time.”

No one has written more lusciously about that pilgrimage, nor undertaken it with more elemental daring, than Beryl Markham (October 16, 1902–August 3, 1986). Known to the world as the first person to fly solo across the Atlantic from East to West with the sweep of night, against headwinds and storms particularly ferocious in that direction, she is Amelia Earhart without the pomp, Thoreau with muscle and humor, a luckier Shackleton of the sky. (Read more.)


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