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Description
(starred review) Somerville makes an impressive book debut with a life of novelist, journalist, and intrepid war correspondent Martha Gellhorn (1908-1998), told through a captivating selection of her letters to friends, family, husbands, and lovers. The volume is enriched by Somerville's biographical narrative and her decision to include responses of many recipients and, in some cases, letters between individuals who were especially significant in Gellhorn's life... An engrossing collection that burnishes Gellhorn's reputation as an astute observer, insightful writer, and uniquely brave woman.
--Kirkus, July 08, 2019
"A titan of American letters. It's high time for Gellhorn to emerge from the shadows of twentieth-century literature into the bright light of mainstream recognition."
--The Washington Post Book World (on Martha Gelhorn)
Before email, when long distance telephone calls were difficult and expensive, people wrote letters, often several each day. Today, those letters provide an intimate and revealing look at the lives and loves of the people who wrote them. When the author is a brilliant writer who lived an exciting, eventful life, the letters are especially interesting.
Martha Gellhorn was a strong-willed, self-made, modern woman whose journalism, and life, were widely influential at the time and cleared a path for women who came after her. An ardent anti-fascist, she abhorred "objectivity shit" and wrote about real people doing real things with intelligence and passion. She is most famous, to her enduring exasperation, as Ernest Hemingway's third wife. Long after their divorce, her short tenure as "Mrs. Hemingway" from 1940 to 1945 invariably eclipsed her writing and, consequently, she never received her full due.
Gellhorn's work and personal life attracted a disparate cadre of political and celebrity friends, among them, Sylvia Beach, Ingrid Bergman, Leonard Bernstein, Norman Bethune, Robert Capa, Charlie Chaplin, Chiang Kai-shek, Madame Chiang, Colette, Gary Cooper, John Dos Passos, Dorothy Parker, Maxwell Perkins, Eleanor and Franklin D. Roosevelt, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Orson Welles, H.G. Wells -- the people who made history in her time and beyond.
Yours, for Probably Always is a curated collection of letters between Gellhorn and the extraordinary personalities that were her correspondents in the most interesting time of her life. Through these letters and the author's contextual narrative, the book covers Gellhorn's life and work, including her time reporting for Harry Hopkins and America's Federal Emergency Relief Administration in the 1930s, her newspaper and magazine reportage during the Spanish Civil War, World War II and the Vietnam War, and her relationships with Hemingway and General James M. Gavin late in the war, and her many lovers and affairs.
Gellhorn's fiction of the time sold well: The Trouble I've Seen (1936) -- her Depression-Era stories based on the FERA activities, with an introduction by H.G. Wells; A Stricken Field (1940) -- a novel inspired by the German-Jewish refugee crisis and set in 1938 Czechoslovakia; The Heart of Another (1941) -- stories edited by Maxwell Perkins; and The Wine of Astonishment (1948) -- her novel about the liberation of Dachau, which she reported for Collier's.
Gellhorn's life, reportage, fiction and correspondence reveal her passionate advocacy of social justice and her need to tell the stories of "the people who were the sufferers of history." Renewed interest in her life makes this new collection, packed with newly discovered letters and pictures, fascinating reading.
Contributor Notes
Janet Somerville taught literature for 20 years in Toronto. Since 2015, she has been wholly immersed in Martha Gellhorn's life and words, privileged to have ongoing access to Gellhorn's restricted papers in Boston, Massachusetts.
Editorial Reviews
A fitting tribute to a remarkable life and career.
— Publishers Weekly
This carefully curated collection of letters between war correspondent, journalist and novelist Gellhorn and her friends, colleagues and lovers -- among them Dorothy Parker, Chiang Kai-shek and her husband, Ernest Hemingway -- reveals the exciting life of a brilliant woman whose work paved the way for many who followed behind her.
— Globe and Mail
(starred review) Somerville makes an impressive book debut with a life of novelist, journalist, and intrepid war correspondent Martha Gellhorn (1908-1998), told through a captivating selection of her letters to friends, family, husbands, and lovers. The volume is enriched by Somerville's biographical narrative and her decision to include responses of many recipients and, in some cases, letters between individuals who were especially significant in Gellhorn's life... An engrossing collection that burnishes Gellhorn's reputation as an astute observer, insightful writer, and uniquely brave woman.
— Kirkus
A book I guarantee you is going to make waves.
— Toronto Star
Book of the Year... Gellhorn was a glamorous novelist, social-justice activist, and fearless war correspondent who covered almost every major conflict of the 20th century. Yet she is most often treated as a historical footnote because of her short-lived marriage to Ernest Hemingway. Thanks to Somerville's tireless efforts, Gellhorn may finally receive the attention she rightfully deserves.
— Quill and Quire
One wonders what will happen when future generations want to understand current famous figures. Look at Twitter accounts? Scrape emails? Thankfully, journalist Martha Gellhorn -- married to Hemingway for a short time -- corresponded by letter with some of the most famous people of her time. This book compiles these missives, many newly discovered, creating a portrait of a modern woman and a chronicle of the 20th century.
— Toronto Star, Gift Guide 2019
A must-read... Captures an extraordinary period in Gellhorn's life... Yours, for Probably Always offers love letters, family exchanges, reports on daily life and missives about politics and conflict. The book is history, geography, psychology and biography all at once... The book includes letters she exchanged with an amazing cast of characters, including H.G. Wells, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Ernest Hemingway -- a riveting fabric that author Somerville stitches together for the reader with a fine thread of biographical detail, bits of conversation, concurrent events and keen observation. Somerville is a magician here, somehow organizing and conveying a mountain of biographical information with brevity and great style.
— Toronto Sun
The letters of the intrepid and passionate war correspondent, Martha Gellhorn -- collected by Janet Somerville in Yours, For Probably Always -- written during the Spanish Civil War and WWII -- have an immediacy and fluency that's very up close and appealing.
— Elle.com
[An] enthralling collection of Gellhorn's correspondence from the 1930s and 1940s.
— The New York Review of Books
As much as any woman in the twentieth century, Martha Gellhorn succeeded in her ambition to 'go everywhere and see everything and sometimes write about it.' It is wonderful to have this compendious new collection of letters from and to her, a few newly discovered. Janet Somerville has carefully set each group of correspondence in its historical context and further enriched them with photographs which even longtime Gellhorn admirers will not have seen.
— Adam Hochschild, author of Spain in Our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939
This is history as it was lived, and shared in intimate and emotional detail, among Gellhorn's lovers, husband, family and friends who were among the most important doers and thinkers of the time. Curated with valuable context by Janet Somerville... It's her own love letter of sorts to a woman she calls "a wonder"... This new offering reminds us how we read history through two prisms: a recollection of the past and a reflection on our own time. So much has changed, and so much is much the same, since our last Martha moment, reason enough to savour a new account... Now we have more of her own words, and those who admired and embraced her, to reflect again on her world and ours.
— Observer
Martha Gellhorn was courageous and committed in love and in war. What a pleasure reading her correspondence and being reminded of how beautifully she wrote, filled with passion and insight. Yours, for Probably Always is a rich resource about an extraordinary life well-lived. The literary stream-of-consciousness letters, uncensored and intimate, read like a novel. There are dramatic flashpoints, but also revelations of everyday existence that are equally absorbing. The book provides genuine insight about Martha Gellhorn and how real she was. It was a huge job to pull this all together and make it read smoothly when you are covering so much territory and Janet Somerville did that with perfect aplomb. She chose wisely so you see Gellhorn's wit, her charisma, but also her hard work and dedication to mankind. The remarkable Martha Gellhorn leaps from the pages of these vivid, witty, deeply human and humane letters. Through her loving curation and attention, Janet Somerville gives voice to a 20th century literary pioneer, too long in shadow. Yours, For Probably Always is an essential book, a ticket into the past, a life spent wildly, often bravely, sometimes not so wisely... Janet Somerville has done a marvelous job with marvelous material. Bravo.
— Azar Nafisi, author of The Republic of Imagination and Reading Lolita in Tehran
You don't need to be familiar with Gellhorn's other writing in order to enjoy her letters; this collection simply fuels the desire to seek out and read all of her work. Her correspondents and Somerville speak so movingly about Gellhorn's reporting that the reader aches to experience these pieces first-hand, and reading how Gellhorn herself describes her fiction-writing process prompts a yearning to track down the final product.... It is important that Gellhorn take her place as a trailblazing journalist and author who made the world better for having written about what she saw.
— Quill and Quire
