Beryl Markham was born Beryl Clutterbuck in a village in the English Midlands, but she grew up in Kenya, where her father took her as a small child to farm and train racehorses near Njoro, in the Rift Valley. Her mother soon went back to England. Beryl stayed, ran barefoot with the children of the neighboring Kipsigis people, learned to hunt with a spear, and was, by her own account, mostly left to raise herself.

At eighteen she became the first woman in Kenya to hold a license to train racehorses, and her horses won the country’s biggest races. Then she learned to fly. In the early 1930s she worked as a bush pilot, carrying mail, passengers and supplies to remote places and scouting elephants from the air for hunting safaris, flying small planes with no radio over country with almost no landing fields.

In September 1936 she set out to do something no one had done alone: fly across the Atlantic from England to North America, against the prevailing winds. She took off from Abingdon, near Oxford, in a single-engine plane called The Messenger, heading for New York. After more than twenty hours, much of it in darkness and storm, ice in the fuel system starved the engine, and she came down in a bog on Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia, nose-first and bleeding. She had made it across. When she reached New York a few days later, thousands of people turned out to cheer her.

In 1942 she published West with the Night, a memoir of her African childhood, her horses and her flying. Ernest Hemingway read it and wrote to his editor that she had “written so well, and marvelously well, that I was completely ashamed of myself as a writer.” The book sold modestly and was forgotten.

Forty years later, a California restaurant owner came across that letter, tracked down the book, and persuaded a small press to bring it back in 1983. It became a bestseller, and found Markham, then past eighty and living in near poverty in Kenya, a little money and a little fame before she died in 1986. People have long wondered how much help she had from her third husband, a writer, and the question has never been settled. The book has been loved regardless.