Yours, For Probably Always

“Passionate despatches from the front line, Martha Gellhorn’s candid letters to her husband, family and friends underline her courage and fight for recognition. Carrying this big brick of a book on my travels while on assignment, I kept dipping into it against the backdrop of another conflagration in Syria with yet more death and displacement. (Here) we have her own words and those who admired and embraced her, to reflect on her world and ours.” —The BBC’s chief international correspondent Lyse Doucet, The Observer. “ What a pleasure reading her correspondence and being reminded of how beautifully she wrote, filled with passion and insight.” —Azar Nafisi. “An essential book ... Janet Somerville has done a marvellous job with marvellous material. Bravo.” —Ward Just. Martha Gellhorn was a strong-willed, self-made, modern woman whose journalism, and life, were widely influential at the time and cleared a path for women who came after her. An ardent anti-fascist, she abhorred “objectivity shit” and wrote about real people doing real things with intelligence and passion. She is most famous, to her enduring exasperation, as Ernest Hemingway’s third wife. Long after their divorce, her short tenure as “Mrs. Hemingway” from 1940 to 1945 invariably eclipsed her writing and, consequently, she never received her full due. Yours, for Probably Always is a curated collection of letters between Gellhorn and the extraordinary personalities that were her correspondents in the most interesting time of her life. Through these letters and the author’s contextual narrative, the book covers Gellhorn’s life and work, including her time reporting for Harry Hopkins and America’s Federal Emergency Relief Administration in the 1930s, her newspaper and magazine reportage during the Spanish Civil War, World War II and the Vietnam War, and her relationships with Hemingway and General James M. Gavin late in the war, and her many lovers and affairs. Martha Gellhorn lived and worked in London for the last 28 years of her life, at 72 Cadogan Square, Knightsbridge where her apartment was a gathering place for many much younger London-based writers and editors who adored her. An English Heritage blue plaque commemorates her life at that address, the first to be dedicated to a “war correspondent”.