West with the Night West with the Night West with the Night is a 1942 memoir by Beryl Markham, chronicling her experiences growing up in Kenya (then British East Africa) in the early 1900s, leading to celebrated careers as a racehorse trainer and bush pilot there. It is considered a classic of outdoor literature and was included in the U.S.A.'s Armed Services Editions shortly after its publication. In 2004, "National Geographic Adventure" ranked it number 8 in a list of 100 best adventure books. Ernest Hemingway was deeply impressed with Markham's writing, saying Markham is the first person to fly the Atlantic east to
I, being born a woman and distressed from artificial constraints, legal or social, or their psychological residue, jealousy." Rather than interpreting the conflict of the poem as an interpersonal one, some critics view the conflict as an internalized "battle of blood against brain." The body may "cloud the mind" of the speaker, but her "staggering brain" loses to her own "stout blood," not to her lover's moves in some sexual contest (Millay 7, 10). By positioning the woman as subject, not object, Millay simultaneously fulfills and subverts the conventions of the sonnet. I, being born a woman and distressed "I, being born a woman and distressed" is