“West With the Night” is a memoir of Markham’s life in Kenya until her mid-1930s departure to England. No less than six of her horses won Kenya’s East African Derby, making her a local celebrity of considerable note. (She didn’t reach New York, as planned – technical difficulties forced her plane into a Nova Scotia bog – but her achievement created substantial headlines regardless.) After being lured to Hollywood by a film project involving her flight, and marrying and divorcing again the man who later claimed this book’s authorship, writer Raoul Schumacher, Markham ultimately returned to Kenya and to racehorse training. After her return to England, in 1936 she became the first woman to successfully cross the Atlantic from east to west, against the headwinds. Having obtained her B license – “a flyer’s Magna Carta” – Markham operated a taxi and cargo service out of Nairobi and worked as a scout for professional hunters like author Karen Blixen’s (Isak Dinesen’s) (ex-)husband Baron Bror Blixen. After marrying and divorcing again wealthy Mansfield Markham, whose last name she kept, she met pioneer aviator Tom Black (later pilot to the Prince of Wales), who awakened her interest in flying and soon became her instructor. Leger, beating the odds and the favorite, Wrack, likewise initially trained by Beryl but taken from her weeks earlier by an owner distrusting her experience. Barely 19, she became a professional racehorse trainer at age 24 (1926) her mare Wise Child won the prestigious Kenya St. And while other girls were groomed to be ladies of society, she learned to ride and train horses, played with the Nandi boys living on her father’s land, and went hunting with their fathers. Taken to Kenya at age three, in 1905, Beryl Markham was raised on a farm by her father and a much-hated governess – her mother soon re-abandoned pioneer life for England.
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