At her English country manor, the writer Rebecca West had two jersey cows: Primrose and Patience. She delighted in the fresh milk they produced, and in canning vegetables, and in making jam. As Julia Cooke writes in Starry and Restless: Three Women Who Changed Work, Writing, and the World, her triple biography of West and her contemporaries Martha Gellhorn and Mickey Hahn, “When an editor at Viking proposed [West] do an entire book on the British Empire, she wrote to him about stewing fruit … cherries simmering with red currants and raspberries, fifteen minutes before adding the sugar.”
This attitude might sound an awful lot like what we’ve come to know as a “tradwife”—a woman celebrating and righteously elevating the quintessentially feminine. A woman beatific in the awareness that life’s deepest meaning lies in kneading dough, gazed upon by the adoring faces of small children, a shaft of warm sunlight in the kitchen.
Yet this was also the woman who wrote with unapologetic frankness, “I hate domesticity.” She sent her son to boarding school when he was 3 years old, and later confessed in a letter to Hahn, a close friend, her “most passionate desire just TO GO AWAY.” West did go away, often: to Yugoslavia, to Mexico, to the southern United States. Her son had a tortured childhood and went on to excoriate West for it in a novel of his own, whose publication West tried her hardest to block.
“Only part of us loves pleasure and the longer day of happiness, wants to live to our nineties and die in peace, in a house that we built,” wrote West in her magnum opus, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon. “The other half of us is nearly mad.”
West is referring here to the absurd human impulse to go to war, having just witnessed the devastation of World War II Britain. But she also, Cooke suggests, is speaking to a profound psychological tension she shared with Hahn and Gellhorn, between a desire for the traditionally feminine realms of motherhood, domesticity, stability, marriage—and an urge, as Martha Gellhorn expressed it in 1941, “to be hell on wheels.”
That tension is never reconciled, and remains a central thread of the book, and yet the story is also much bigger than this. Cooke manages to pull off the rare feat of profiling women writers without rendering their lives tragic tales of suppressed ambition, perpetual struggles against the limitations imposed on their sex, or exemplary narratives of triumphing over expectations. They’re all of these, of course, because how could they not be? But they’re also more than any story about how a woman should be. They evade the ideology that seems to have captured so much contemporary writing about womanhood, in which a woman must stand for something: a bold countercultural desire to “go back to the kitchen,” unflinching art monsterhood, leaning in and girlbossing—in which a woman’s story is an inspirational template or cautionary tale for other women about how to be the right kind of woman.
Instead, Cooke’s book illuminates the profound complexity of women’s lives without any apologizing, justifying, or moralizing. These women do not take flight into the great beyond and liberate themselves once and for all, or fail to do so and flounder in desperation. They leap and they return, they spin in place and they flee, they create nests and abandon them and create new ones and long for the old. They grow, learn, regret, reflect. Cooke’s book offers the reader the rare gift of space without judgment, which isn’t to say she endorses all of these women’s choices. She simply lets them live, without wedging them into some sort of moral or ideological framework. She presents them not as a blueprint but as a kind of permission, above all, to evolve: to move through many iterations of oneself and of womanhood.
These three women lived personal and professional lives of startling range. Of the three, Mickey Hahn may be the least well known, despite being absurdly prolific and immensely popular in her era. Hahn published her first book in her twenties and her last in her eighties, with more than 50 histories, biographies, memoirs, travel books, and novels in between—plus a handful of children’s books and an entire archive of feature stories and essays as a correspondent for The New Yorker. Born Emily Hahn in Missouri in 1905, she also embodies the restlessness of Cooke’s title, with one bout of self-reinvention after another. In her wild twenties, Hahn described mothers as “placid unafraid cowlike beings”; a decade later, she had survived the Japanese occupation of China, married a British Army major and had a daughter, and settled into rural domestic life in England. China to Me, her 1944 book about her years in China, detailed the adventures of a fearless twentysomething who reigned over Shanghai’s nightlife with a gibbon on her shoulder; England to Me (1949), her book about her time in England, “depicted a chorus of maternal and domestic complexity,” as she raised her children in a rural English village. Later, when Hahn’s daughters were off at school, she left again, returning to New York as a staff writer for The New Yorker, embarking on frequent international journeys.
Of Gellhorn, meanwhile, Cooke writes, “She had no idea how to handle a baby but decided, after traveling from Rome to New York, that flying with an infant was harder than covering the Russian attack on Finland.” In 1949, at the age of 41, Gellhorn became a single mother to an Italian war orphan, with whom she lived first in Cuernavaca, then Rome, and finally England. She could not, Cooke points out, “sew a button, make a bed, cook a potato,” and told her lover at one point that all she needed was books and travel. Yet she also described the experience of mothering her son, to adopt whom she had to fight using all her influence, as “having the sun built in to one’s private world.”
West’s story is arguably the most tragic: In 1913, she became pregnant by literary giant H.G. Wells, who declined to leave his wife and offered to support her and their son only if she kept his paternity secret and moved to the rural hinterlands. West was 21 years old. She refused to get an abortion or comply with Wells’s mandates, and yet, brimming with ambition and hunger for the world, she struggled with single motherhood. The decision to send her son away to school created a trauma he’d remember with bitterness all his life. She and her son would always have a contentious relationship, even as she tried constantly to reconcile with him, apologize, and support his own family—whom he ultimately abandoned. Her life’s deepest hurt was her desire to understand him and be understood; his was his inability to forgive her.
These women’s lives are less movements from A to B to C than revolutions around persistent longings and ways of seeing the world. The tensions—between stability in family relationships; motherhood; career ambition; and the need for movement, for finding meaning outside—never dissipate, nor are they reconciled. Cooke doesn’t overwrite their lives with political or ideological codes, instead asking us to find a kind of relief in their complexity, in the way their relentless seeking took many forms, at turns quiet, interior, loud, fearless, wild, humbled, gentle. They cycled through many identities and often did not recognize their former selves.
Cooke describes Mickey Hahn’s transformations in this perfect passage: “She would soon perform a series of roles, each canted at a slight angle away from how she saw herself, each a slightly more public person than the last: a woman alongside a well-known man; a pregnant woman; then a mother.… The independent young writer with the gibbon on her shoulder–not a monkey–would stay behind forever, drifting somewhere into the silt at the bottom of Shanghai’s river.” Yet long after this young, carefree version of herself had sunk into silt, Hahn returned to her passions and visions. Cooke defines Hahn and her compatriots not so much by who they were or weren’t—mothers, independent young writers, wives—but by how they performed and understood these roles, often in tension with one another.
Women can feel so much pressure to position themselves vis-à-vis their womanhood, or to adopt a particular identity around it: Are you more tradwife or career woman? Are you a ruthless artist or a crunchy mama? A “choice feminist” or a feminist? I felt this pressure intensely as a “woman writer,” a moniker that comes with its own baggage. I wrote a book about becoming a mother and quickly realized that for many in the literary world, this sounded the death knell of a “serious” career. I tried to look head on at this problem instead of running from it, advocating for motherhood as a significant subject for art. I essentially assigned myself the motherhood beat, though I discovered that the range of what is acceptable to write on that beat is limited.
“Quite a job being a woman isn’t it; you cannot do your work and simply get on with it because that’s selfish, you have to be two things at once,” Martha Gellhorn wrote to Eleanor Roosevelt about her flailing marriage to Ernest Hemingway, who was pitching a fit about her reporting from war-torn Europe instead of tending to him on their Cuban finca. Yet it was precisely this condition of being “two things at once” that gave Gellhorn’s writing, and West’s, and Hahn’s, its poignancy, depth, and power.
Reporting from Spain during its Civil War, Gellhorn recounted both the expected drama—the bombs shattering buildings, the bodies on the front—and the surreal mix of tedium and tragedy that defines domestic life during wartime. While witnessing the advancing fascist troops from a bombed-out house, she wrote about both the troops and the house: the wedding photos, “the curling pins and emptied peroxide bottles in the bathroom.”
When she went to send her dispatch, a “laughing, condescending German” filed only part of it, having deemed it “human interest” instead of a war story. Gellhorn was furious but undeterred: She wrote of mothers and children, houses, wallpaper, and battle. While Hemingway tended to embellish the war experience into a profound and manly trial of life, death, and courage, eventually transmuting his time in Spain into For Whom the Bell Tolls, Gellhorn saw a confusing mess—“college kids on an outing”—that ended in devastation. She wrote in her journal: “Note the role of women in this mess.”
Later in life, Gellhorn fled her house in Cuernavaca, Mexico, and left her son—the war orphan she had recently adopted from Italy—with a nanny so she could hole up in Haiti and work on a novel about … the life of an Italian war orphan growing up in expatriate circles in Cuernavaca, Mexico.
Mickey Hahn too embodied these contradictions. She wrote then-scandalous novels about her abortion and her friend who was a high-level paid escort in Shanghai; she wrote a bestselling biography of the Soong sisters, American-educated Chinese women married to China’s most prominent political figures; she wrote travel books that mixed memoir about her relationships and domestic life with political and cultural observations. She sailed third-class to the Belgian Congo at the age of 25, moved to Shanghai on a whim and learned Cantonese, relocated to World War II Chongqing as it was riddled by Japanese bombs, and made her career “like a he-man”—yet resisted the label of “feminist” when a New Yorker editor described her as one. Feminists had clubs, they had causes; she had her life and her writing.
Hahn had an aversion to politics in general, declaring she was interested in “everything else—art, sex, people, what they wanted, who they were, and how they got that way.” Still, her life and work were feminist in nature: She argued for women’s right to work, often to great frustration and exhaustion as the women of her era insisted a woman must stay home. She practiced the same sexual liberties as her husband when they lived apart, in England and New York. She traveled, relentlessly, as way of seeing and as a way of freeing herself from the pull of stasis, which could trap a woman. “Families are the devil,” she wrote Rebecca West. Still, she had two daughters and a marriage that lasted decades, until her husband’s death, and she described birth as her “ideal of an experience.”
West, for her part, explained in a letter, “I have never been able to write with anything more than the left hand of my mind; the right has always been engaged in something to do with personal relationships.” Yet that dedication to personal relationships arguably gave her the vision she needed to write books like The Meaning of Treason, a treatise on the Nuremburg trials that drew in part on her experience attending the trials for The New Yorker and in part on the paroxysms of drama she was experiencing with her son, who had left and then returned to his wife. She compared the inability of children to reconcile the love and hate they feel for their parents with the inability of the traitor to accept his society, and the urge to destroy it instead. This work, born as much out of psychoanalysis of her own motherhood as old-fashioned courtroom reporting, led a New York Times reviewer to declare, “She writes with such force as to make most male writers appear effeminate.”
Cooke could have taken a structural lens here: These women’s struggles, particularly those of single mothers Gellhorn and West, could have been ameliorated with more familial and societal support; all of the women swam upstream against sexism and discrimination that has extended even into their legacies, with the story of “new journalism” written largely as one of the gonzo bro journalists of the 1960s (all hail Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson). More structural support for women is something all of us should be fighting for if we care about the health of our society; if we truly value women’s lives and perspectives, and don’t treat them as an invisible safety net for all our social problems.
But even with those structural supports, the difficulty of being a woman, a wife, a mother, a writer, a traveler, all at once, in one short life, remains. It’s easier, but still there. Instead, it’s worth asking what this complexity and tension might offer.
In Cooke’s book I find a rare kind of permission: it’s OK to be all the things at once, messy and jumbled; or maybe one thing for two years here, or five years there, or even several decades, and then something else entirely. American culture is obsessed with linear narratives—a neat and tidy bio that shows how a person has become increasingly accomplished until they’ve reached a shining zenith; a satisfying story, in which someone ceases to be X and becomes Y, or finally gives up on A to embrace B. Mutability is unsettling. But the uncertainty and friction created by mutability is what makes great art.
After Mickey Hahn’s girls left home, she took a trip to Taiwan. “The sheer joy of reporting while traveling—the balance of toughness and flexibility it required, the spontaneity and grit—had all come sweeping back,” Cooke writes. After a whole lifetime raising children, having polite conversations with proper ladies in the English countryside, tending to her marriage, she returned, alone, to Asia, and found yet another version of herself—sans gibbon, sans pizzazz of the early ’20s, perhaps, but still leading “the strangest, most fascinating existence, wandering around in an inefficient manner,” carrying a toothbrush in her pocket in case she didn’t make it back to her guesthouse.
“My whole life I have spent squirming around, wriggling, shifting, scratching, trying to find a way to be comfortable in my skin and on earth, and failing,” Gellhorn wrote to an expat friend in Mexico. In its rendering of this “squirming … wriggling, shifting, scratching, trying,” Cooke’s book is a reminder that there is no end, no settled self, no ultimate definition—just cycles, revolutions, and returns, the traces of seeking in which other restless women may seek solace.
