The Correspondents
Six Women Writers on the Front Lines of World War II
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
The riveting, untold history of a group of heroic women reporters who revolutionized the narrative of World War II—from Martha Gellhorn, who out-scooped her husband, Ernest Hemingway, to Lee Miller, a Vogue cover model turned war correspondent.
"Thrilling from the first page to the last." —Mary Gabriel, author of Ninth Street Women
"Just as women are so often written out of war, so it seems are the female correspondents. Mackrell corrects this omission admirably with stories of six of the best…Mackrell has done us all a great service by assembling their own fascinating stories." —New York Times Book Review
On the front lines of the Second World War, a contingent of female journalists were bravely waging their own battle. Barred from combat zones and faced with entrenched prejudice and bureaucratic restrictions, these women were forced to fight for the right to work on equal terms with men.
The Correspondents follows six remarkable women as their lives and careers intertwined: Martha Gellhorn, who got the scoop on Ernest Hemingway on D-Day by traveling to Normandy as a stowaway on a Red Cross ship; Lee Miller, who went from being a Vogue cover model to the magazine’s official war correspondent; Sigrid Schultz, who hid her Jewish identity and risked her life by reporting on the Nazi regime; Virginia Cowles, a “society girl columnist” turned combat reporter; Clare Hollingworth, the first English journalist to break the news of World War II; and Helen Kirkpatrick, the first woman to report from an Allied war zone with equal privileges to men.
From chasing down sources and narrowly dodging gunfire to conducting tumultuous love affairs and socializing with luminaries like Eleanor Roosevelt, Picasso, and Man Ray, these six women are captured in all their complexity. With her gripping, intimate, and nuanced portrait, Judith Mackrell celebrates these courageous reporters who risked their lives for the scoop.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
WWII was "the defining opportunity for female correspondents," according to this immersive and revealing group biography. Guardian journalist Mackrell (Flappers: Six Women of a Dangerous Generation) follows correspondents Sigrid Schultz, Helen Kirkpatrick, Martha Gellhorn, Virginia Cowles, Clare Hollingworth, and photographer Lee Miller from Berlin in the 1930s, where Chicago Tribune bureau chief Schultz cultivated Nazi leader Hermann Göring as a source, to the 1947 Paris Peace Conference, where Gellhorn and Kirkpatrick feared that the same mistakes that failed to resolve the tensions of WWI were being made. Sparkling quotations from the reportage are woven throughout (Gellhorn once wrote that British prime minister Neville Chamberlain had a "face like a nutcracker and a soul like a weasel"), and colorful biographical details shed light on the correspondents' defiance of conventions and "basic hunger for action." Miller was a Vogue model before she picked up the camera, Mackrell notes, while Gellhorn stowed away in the bathroom of a hospital ship to be the first woman reporter to cover the Normandy landings. Secondary characters including Ernest Hemingway, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Clare Boothe Luce make entertaining appearances, and Mackrell lucidly sketches military and political matters. The result is a rousing portrait of women who not only reported on history, but made it themselves.
