Caroline Moorehead has a pretty well written biography on her called: "Martha Gellhorn: A Life".
It's a pretty even-keeled look at Gellhorn and Hemingway, peeling back the layers of personality and some of the mythos to reveal how they were not always nice people to be around (although, Hemingway does come across as particularly boorish). Gellhorn was incredibly precocious and driven and often hard-headed. The sheer distance she traveled in her life and the things she got up to were almost impossible for your average woman in America to fathom at that time. She probably needed to adopt a near insane sense of self-confidence to go through with some of the things. She had incredible expectations for herself and, unfortunately, the later years of her life never seemed to match what she wanted out of her life and come across as quite depressing. Then again, few birth-to-death biographies have entertaining later years.
True, though that's a mostly-modern phenomenon. Back when life expectancy was far shorter, and sudden-ish death due to injury or disease was far more common...
It's a pretty even-keeled look at Gellhorn and Hemingway, peeling back the layers of personality and some of the mythos to reveal how they were not always nice people to be around (although, Hemingway does come across as particularly boorish). Gellhorn was incredibly precocious and driven and often hard-headed. The sheer distance she traveled in her life and the things she got up to were almost impossible for your average woman in America to fathom at that time. She probably needed to adopt a near insane sense of self-confidence to go through with some of the things. She had incredible expectations for herself and, unfortunately, the later years of her life never seemed to match what she wanted out of her life and come across as quite depressing. Then again, few birth-to-death biographies have entertaining later years.