Women’s history buffs and readers who enjoyed Erik Larson’s Dead Wake will have a bon voyage. In an engaging and anecdotal social history, Sin Evanss Maiden Voyages explores how womens lives were transformed by the Golden Age of ocean liner. Excerpts from the memoirs of the “unsinkable” Violet Jessop, a stewardess and nurse who survived the sinkings of the Titanic and the Britannic, and Edith Sowerbutts, a “conductress” who cared for unaccompanied women and children, provide color and drama, as does the story of journalist Martha Gellhorn, who hitched rides aboard a dynamite-laden cargo vessel and a hospital ship in order to cover the D-Day landings. Maiden Voyages: Magnificent Ocean Liners and the Women Who Traveled and Worked Aboard Them by Siân Evans The early twentieth century was the era of transatlantic travel in which women from the highest to the lowest social classes made their way between the Old and New Worlds. Delafield to their lectures in North America, and brought war brides to their new homes in the U.S. The liners also carried popular writers like Vera Brittain and E.M. Drawing on diaries, letters, and published accounts, Evans’s sweeping history takes in the celebrities who frolicked in first class, including Marlene Dietrich and Tallulah Bankhead widows who found work onboard and aspirational emigrants such as Mary Ann MacLeod, who left Scotland in abject poverty in 1930 and became a “New World matriarch” as Mrs. Historian Evans ( Queen Bees) delivers an entertaining chronicle of transatlantic ocean travel in the first half of the 20th century focused on the female passengers and crew members who stepped aboard such famous ocean liners as the Olympic, the Titanic, and the Queen Mary. Historian Evans ( Queen Bees) delivers an entertaining chronicle of transatlantic ocean travel in the first half of the 20th century focused on the female passengers and crew members who stepped.

Sian evans maiden voyages