Title
Title

"Mary Lovell is the real thing: a biographer passionately interested in her subjects. She realises her material and retells with tremendous verve all the best stories." The Times.

The Splendid Outcast

The Splendid Outcast title

The African stories of Beryl Markham - compiled and introduced by Mary S. Lovell.

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UK Hardback

UK Hardback

The Splendid Outcast (Hutchinson) Publication date October 1987 Hardback
ISBN 978-0091726041

UK Paperback

UK Paperback

The Splendid Outcast (North Point Press) Publication date 1987 Paperback
ISBN 9780865473013

USA Hardback

USA Hardback

The Splendid Outcast (North Point Press) Publication date 1987 Hardback
ISBN 978-0865473010

Beryl Markham's African Stories, never before collected, were written in the 1940s, after her classic memoir WEST WITH THE NIGHT - now an international bestseller.

Some of the stories are autobiographical, covering episodes that were not contained in that remarkable work; some are fictional - and all are richly romantic.

Markham writes about the things she knows racehorses, flying, the Masai, even a beautiful young aviatrix - and sets her stories in the glorious African settings which she loved so well and evoked with such timeless mastery. She is, with Karen Blixen and Elspeth Huxley, one of the great chroniclers of life in colonial Kenya between the wars.

One of the arguments by those who sought to prove that Beryl was not the actual author of her splendid memoir, was the belief that 'she never wrote anything else'. Mary S. Lovell scotches this contention by bringing together a collection of short stories written by Beryl in the same vein as West with the Night. Lovell discovered these stories while researching for her best-selling biography of Markham, and now that Markham herself is dead, no one is better equipped to introduce them.