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Beryl, as everyone called her, spent money when she had it and ran up bills when she did not. In important matters, which meant clothes and horses, she went first-class. She had women friends -- Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen) was an early protector -- but she liked men better. Her maternal instinct was fitful at best, and her appetite for casual sex made uproarious disarray of her marriages. Blixen once wrote of her own husband Bror (who became Beryl's occasional bedmate) that "he looked down benevolently and lasciviously upon womankind and had been raised to believe that the entire world existed, as did the fish in his streams and the game in his woods, for his pleasure." Shift the pronouns to feminine, and the description would have fit Markham.
Lovell speculates reasonably, though conventionally, that much of Markham's adult adventuring was an attempt to find a man as admirable as her father. He was an English ex-army officer named Charles Baldwin Clutterbuck, who, separated from his wife, reared Beryl in Kenya when she was a child. It was from him that she learned horses and an extreme form of self-reliance.
The question has been raised whether Markham's memoir could have been her own work, given her lack of formal schooling. Biographer Lovell's convincing answer is yes. The scholar and legendary white hunter Denys Finch Hatton, Blixen's great love and one of Beryl's many, had helped Markham make up much of the education she had missed. Though her good friend, the aviator and author Antoine de Saint-Exupery, strongly influenced her writing, chronology shows that the work could not have been his. Her third husband, a failed writer named Raoul Schumacher, did some useful editing, but despite embittered statements he made after their breakup, most of her book was written before they met. She was her own writer, her own woman and a force of nature still remembered with awe in East Africa. "I don't think Beryl ever thought how her behavior must have appeared to the people of the real world," a friend once said, "and if she had thought, she would have said it was stupid and would certainly never have let it worry her for a minute."