Books published by publisher Virago Press

Beryl Markham moved to Kenya with her father at the age of four and stayed until her death in 1986. Her incredible autobiography describes the Africa she learnt to love: her childhood surrounded by the tribal people, her tangles - often nearly fatal - with its wild animals and her passions for racehorses and aeroplanes.Markham achieved notoriety and success as a horse trainer when one of her horses won the most prestigious race in Kenya. She turned her hand to aeroplanes with Denys Finch Hatton, the lover of Karen Blixen, as a teacher and became the first woman in Kenya to receive a commercial pilot's licence. Her adventures and courageous career as a bush pilot are recounted in vivid detail here, along with the richness and fascination of life in Kenya in the twenties and thirties.

Francis Marion Beynon’s autobiographical novel Aleta Dey is increasingly recognised as a small classic of early twentieth-century fiction. Beynon was a journalist and feminist much involved in public affairs in early twentieth-century Manitoba. In 1917, aged 33, she was forced to leave her job as a result of her open pacifism, and she soon moved to New York where she dropped out of the public eye. Aleta Dey, first published in 1919, tells in plain and affecting prose the story of a girl growing up in Manitoba, becoming politically conscious, and falling in love with McNair, a man of much more conventional views. The First World War brings a crisis for them both after McNair enlists as a soldier. Though Beynon was a Canadian, her spare, emotionally open prose may have less in common with that of other Canadian writers of the time than it does with the style of contemporaneous western American women writers such as Willa Cather and Laura Ingalls Wilder. Like Cather’s My Antonia, Beynon’s Aleta Dey resonates with prairie simplicity, passion, and strength.

This book is an exceptional story about a woman, who couldn't be a jazz performer, just because she was a woman, back in the day when men were the source of playing in a band. She, Dorothy Tipton, changed her looks and her name to Billy, found a way to perform on stage, without the ridicule of being a woman.Living the rest of her life as a man, was a surprise to even his adopted children, when he died