Maiden Voyages: Magnificent Ocean Liners and the Women Who Traveled and Worked Aboard Them

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. 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. Fred Trump. The liners also carried popular writers like Vera Brittain and E.M. Delafield to their lectures in North America, and brought war brides to their new homes in the U.S. 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. Women’s history buffs and readers who enjoyed Erik Larson’s Dead Wake will have a bon voyage. (Aug.)