Hemingway said she wrote better than him. He also said he couldn't stand her. Both were true.
In 1942, Ernest Hemingway wrote a private letter to his editor that wouldn't be discovered for forty years. In it, he admitted something that clearly bothered him. A woman he considered difficult and unpleasant had written a book so good it made him ashamed of his own work.
He called her brilliant. He called her a writer who could "write rings around all of us." He also called her a "high-grade" insult in the same paragraph. The woman was Beryl Markham. And if that contradiction bothered Hemingway, it was nothing compared to how Beryl made the rest of the world feel.
Born in England in 1902, Beryl arrived in British East Africa as a small child when her father decided to start a new life in Kenya. While other colonial children learned proper manners and prepared for conventional futures, Beryl was doing something entirely different.
She ran wild across the African plains with Maasai children. She learned to hunt. She developed a relationship with horses that bordered on instinctual. And she absorbed a single, unshakeable belief: that the rules other people followed didn't have to apply to her.
By her late teens, Beryl had become something that shouldn't have existed in 1920s Kenya—or anywhere else. She was a licensed racehorse trainer. Not an assistant. Not a hobbyist. A professional trainer competing against men, winning races, and earning respect in one of the most male-dominated fields imaginable.
People were scandalized. A teenage woman, alone with horses and male jockeys, working in stables, making her own money. It violated every social expectation of the era. Beryl didn't care.
In her twenties and thirties, she became a bush pilot. She flew mail, supplies, and occasionally wealthy hunters across the vast African wilderness in a fragile single-engine plane. Her navigation system? Rivers, mountains, elephant migrations. Her backup plan if the engine failed over remote bush? There wasn't one.
She survived crashes. She survived close calls. She survived an industry that didn't want her there.
And then, in 1936, at age thirty-four, Beryl decided to attempt something that terrified even the most experienced aviators in the world. She would fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean. Not the relatively achievable west-to-east route that Charles Lindbergh and Amelia Earhart had flown. The other way. East to west. Against brutal headwinds. Through the night. In a single-engine plane with limited fuel capacity.
Multiple pilots had tried this route. None had succeeded flying solo and non-stop.
On September 4, 1936, Beryl climbed into her Vega Gull aircraft at an airfield in England. She carried minimal supplies. No co-pilot. No safety net. She pointed the nose of her plane toward the darkness and took off.
For more than twenty-one hours, she fought. Headwinds pushed against her constantly. Ice formed on the wings. Fuel gauges dropped. Exhaustion set in. Below her, the invisible Atlantic stretched endlessly. Above, only stars. Around her, only the sound of a single engine that had to keep running or she would die.
Twenty-one hours and twenty-five minutes after takeoff, nearly out of fuel, Beryl crash-landed in a peat bog in Nova Scotia. She'd been aiming for New York but fell short. It didn't matter.
She had just become the first person in history to fly solo, non-stop, east to west across the Atlantic Ocean. The impossible direction. The route experts said couldn't be done.
The world went wild. Awards, interviews, headlines. Beryl Markham, the fearless aviatrix who had conquered the Atlantic the hard way.
And then, gradually, she faded from memory.
In 1942, she published her memoir, West With the Night. Critics praised its lyrical prose and vivid descriptions of Africa and aviation. It sold modestly. Then it went out of print and was largely forgotten.
What the public didn't know was that Hemingway had written that private letter about Beryl's book—the one where he admitted she could write circles around established authors. The one where he struggled to reconcile her talent with his personal dislike of her.
That letter stayed hidden in archives for decades.
In 1983, someone discovered it. West With the Night was suddenly reprinted. The literary world rediscovered Beryl Markham—not just as a daring pilot, but as one of the finest prose stylists of her generation.
The woman Hemingway couldn't stand had written something he couldn't stop thinking about.
Beryl's life was messy. She had multiple marriages and numerous affairs. She made enemies easily. She was often broke. People described her as opportunistic, cold, selfish. She wasn't easy to be around. She wasn't interested in being liked.
But she lived by something she wrote in her memoir: "Every tomorrow ought not to resemble every yesterday."
She refused templates. She trained horses when society said women couldn't. She flew planes when it was considered reckless and unfeminine. She crossed the Atlantic when experts declared it suicide. She wrote beautifully when people assumed she was just a pretty adventuress.
Beryl Markham died in Kenya in 1986, at age eighty-three. Complicated. Controversial. Brilliant. Difficult. Fearless. And unforgettable.
She proved something that still matters today: You don't have to be likable to be extraordinary. You don't have to be easy to be important. You don't have to fit expectations to leave a mark.
Sometimes the people who make us most uncomfortable are the ones showing us what's actually possible when you stop asking for permission.
On the tribulations of an expatriate in Europe
Sunday, February 15, 2026
Unlikely. Unapologetic. Unforgettable
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