She was thirty-three when she climbed into the Vega Gull at Abingdon, a secondhand aircraft with no radio and a single fuel gauge. Beryl Markham had logged more than two thousand hours in the air by then, flown through dust storms and monsoons, and stripped down engines with her own hands. No woman had ever flown solo from England to New York against the prevailing winds. Several people had died trying.

She had no sponsor, no press agent, only the loan of a plane and a purpose she kept mostly to herself. She took off on the evening of September 4, 1936, waved once through the cockpit window, and vanished into weather that had already claimed another aircraft that day. The flight was a battle from the first hour. Headwinds hammered the nose of the machine.

Her chart was ripped from her hand and swept into the gray. Lightning flipped the plane upside down until she righted it with a calm that surprised even her. Coffee scalded her thigh when a flask slipped in turbulence. The cold worked its way into her gloves and boots.

After more than twenty hours of flying, she was low on fuel and slightly off course when Cape Race appeared through the mist off Newfoundland. She could not reach New York. She put the plane down in a bog at Baleine, Nova Scotia, where the wheels sank and the nose pitched forward. She climbed out, blood running from a cut on her forehead, and walked until she found two fishermen.

I’m Mrs. Markham, she told them. I’ve just flown from England. The world had been waiting for her all night.

Two thousand people had gathered at Floyd Bennett Field in New York, then five thousand, watching the sky. Radio messages had tracked her westbound across the ocean, and then nothing. When the news broke that she was alive, the headlines came fast. First woman flies Atlantic east to west.

She was feted in Manhattan, interviewed on live radio, offered champagne cocktails. A Hollywood studio proposed a film about her life. But the morning after the triumph, the phone rang. It was a friend.

Tom Campbell Black, the pilot who had taught her to fly, the man she had loved, was dead. He had been killed in a test flight in Liverpool when a landing bomber crossed his path and its propeller tore through his cockpit. He was thirty-seven. She had abandoned the old life for the sky, and the sky had taken him.

She canceled everything. She boarded the Queen Mary for England without saying goodbye to anyone. The man from Columbia Pictures approached her on deck and asked if she would play herself in a film. She agreed without conviction, and the project was quietly shelved after a poor screen test.

Her birth had been unremarkable, in a modest house in Rutland, England, in October 1902. Her parents argued for weeks over a name and finally settled on Beryl. Her father, Charles Clutterbuck, was a former army officer who had been asked to resign in 1897 under a veil of disgrace, a talented rider who turned to training horses. In 1904, he boarded a steamer for British East Africa, where the crown was giving away rich red volcanic soil to settlers willing to tame it.

Her mother followed with the children a year later, but the frontier defeated her. Within months she was gone, and Beryl would not see her again until she was an adult. She never forgave the abandonment. Kenya raised her instead.

She grew up wild on a thousand-acre farm on the Mau Escarpment, speaking Swahili as fluently as English, tracking animals before she could write her name. Her guardians were Kikuyu house boys and Kipsigis herdsmen. Her closest companion was Kibii, the son of her father’s herdsman. She slept in a hut apart from her father’s house, lulled by hyenas and the crackle of cedar fires.

She shot bows better than most boys, survived a lion attack, and joined warriors on hunts while still a child. By her early teens she could birth foals, heal sick horses, and ride stallions no one else would touch. A tutor called her wild as a stallion and just as hard to catch. She was expelled from boarding school after two years, officially for disobedience, unofficially for being untameable.

At sixteen she married Jock Purves, a Scottish veteran thirteen years her senior, in a union widely whispered to be a settlement of her father’s debts. It was not a love match, and it did not last. She left him, taking her horse Pegasus, and drifted through the orbit of Karen Blixen and the notorious Happy Valley set. In 1927 she married Mansfield Markham, heir to a British industrial fortune, and moved to London.

There she began an affair with Prince Henry, Duke of Gloucester, son of King George V. The affair was open enough that Mansfield, armed with letters, prepared to name the prince in a divorce petition. The monarchy intervened. A settlement was arranged, fifteen thousand pounds, with an annuity of seven hundred fifty pounds a year, on the condition that Beryl disappear from English society and never speak of the affair.

She left her infant son with his grandmother and sailed back to Kenya in disgrace. Kenya was no longer a refuge. Friends crossed the street to avoid her. Only Karen Blixen opened her doors.

At Blixen’s house, Beryl met Dennis Finch Hatton, the man Karen loved. He took her flying over the Rift Valley, read poetry to her by firelight, and they became lovers. When he left on a scouting trip along the Tana River, he invited her along. She declined, because she had a flying lesson scheduled.

On May 14, 1931, his plane circled twice over Voi, wobbled, and crashed beyond the ridge, bursting into flames on impact. He was buried on a hill in the Ngong Hills, where he had once said he wanted to rest. Beryl stood apart at the funeral, the other woman, silent, while Karen’s grief consumed the day. After Dennis died, Beryl threw herself into flying with a focus no one who knew her had ever seen.

She had learned under Tom Campbell Black, a precise, unromantic instructor who demanded discipline. He took a post as private pilot to Lord and Lady Furness, and their relationship deepened from a distance. In 1933 she flew solo to England to see him, across deserts and storms in seven days. She sensed something had cooled.

By 1935 he had met the actress Florence Desmond. Beryl sent a telegram. Darling, is it true you are to marry Florence Desmond? Please answer.

Stop. Heartbroken, Beryl. There was no answer. He married Florence Desmond that spring.

She never got over it. The flight across the Atlantic had been her answer to his abandonment, and he was dead before she could land. She returned to England, declared bankruptcy, and drifted. In Los Angeles, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry told her she should write her story.

She resisted until the money ran low, then wrote on a veranda in the Bahamas while her younger husband, Raoul Schumacher, edited pages beside her typewriter. West with the Night was published in 1942 to critical acclaim, including a famous tribute from Ernest Hemingway, who said she could write rings around all of us who consider ourselves writers. But the world was at war, and the book sold modestly before vanishing. Her marriage to Raoul collapsed, and she divorced him in 1960.

She had returned to Kenya, nearly penniless, and rebuilt her life as a racehorse trainer. In 1959 her filly Niagara won the Kenya St. Leger, a race she had won thirty-three years earlier. The next year the horse took the East African Derby, then the St.

Ledger, securing the Kenyan triple crown. The last horse to do that had been trained by her father decades before. She topped the trainer standings for six consecutive years. In 1964 she partnered with Lady Enid Kenmare, a four-time widow of formidable reputation, to build an all-female racing stable in South Africa.

It dissolved as such partnerships did, and she drifted again, eventually returning to Kenya, where she trained her last winner at age eighty in 1983. That same year, a California reader named George Gudakunst discovered Hemingway’s letters praising West with the Night and convinced North Point Press to republish it. The book was met with rapture and found the audience it had missed forty years earlier. Anonymous callers claimed her ex-husband had written it, but her correspondence with the publisher, dating from 1941, long before Raoul entered the story, proved otherwise.

Beryl Markham died on August 3, 1986, a month before the fiftieth anniversary of her Atlantic crossing. Pneumonia took her, quietly, in a hospital she had always hated. The previous April she had attended Derby day in Nairobi, radiant in denim and silk, and fallen down a stone staircase on the way out. Her hip broke in late July after she tripped over her dog, the operation was followed by pneumonia, and she slipped away.

Her ashes were scattered across the fields she once rode with her father, into the soil she walked with Kibii, and into the skies she shared with Tom and Dennis. No monument marks her grave. She had written once, near the end of her memoir, I wonder if the life that I am living is not really the dream I dreamed when I was ten.

In that dream, she finally rests, the barefoot girl who could not fall, the woman who crossed oceans, the legend that flew into history.