Rayna's Big Dilemma!

Rayna is a voracious reader of biographies and so, with her, you can chat about anyone who was ever anyone any time and any place and have the best discussions ever: like, who were Lawrence of Arabia's real parents, what happened to Jim Morrison when he was 10 that turned him into such an angry young man, did those workman mean to kill Brian Jones or was it an accident? Truly admirable good-fun stuff.

And I especially admire the way she reads AROUND biographies, filling in all the details of the Era, the social environment, the current ideas and ideologies, and on the lives of other people involved in the life of whoever it is currently intriguing her. She gets the full picture and then, bam!, her interest goes off ... and it's on to someone new!

Only a winsy sample of Rayna's
collection of biographies!

But now she has a problem. "I've done everyone. Truly, there is now no one left around who is interesting enough to warrant my time and attention!"



So, as a fellow brain-addler, I've been racking my brains, trying to come up with someone she hasn't done and who is truly and profoundly interesting.

My own fabulous people, who've warranted a lifetime of biography-reading on my part, were offered but are of no interest to her: Captain Cook, La Perouse, Alfred Wallace, Mahatma Gandhi, Albert Einstein, John Harrison, Leonardo da Vinci.

So who else do I have who intrigues me? Alexander Dalrymple! Not that cousin of Virginia Woolf historian guy! I'm talking about that historical Dalrymple guy who Dalrymple Shire in Queensland is named after. He's this really strange coot from the 18th century who has never been written about himself but who keeps turning up in other people's biographies going "Hey, look at me, look at me!" and sometimes he features as this really nasty sabotaging dickwit and other times as "a helpful friend" which means, overall, I really can't get a handle on him.

Piques your interest? No?

What about Sir Andrew Merton? He was some ancestor of my mother's and the founder of that first college at Oxford, and there's ever so much stuff in there in the background of his life that is really strange and in need of exploration. But good luck with finding anything written about him. He's managed to escape scrutiny by flying very low under the radar.

Still nothing?

OK, here's someone you WILL totally love. You remember in the Africa-based books by Karen Blixen and the film "Out of Africa" there's that little girl - Felicity? - who runs around in men's clothing and is forever saying all sorts of funny and inappropriate things? She was based on a real person, and, although I can't remember her name, for some reason the words Amanda Fish are going around in my head.

The woman who may be named Amanda Fish is very intriguing, living a very full life, doing everything going down during the Jazz Age, flew the first solo Europe-to-America flight across the Atlantic, was the inspiration behind the character of Lady Cynthia Darlington in that awful Katherine Hepburn film "Christopher Strong", and who bonked everyone worth bonking for nearly 30 years, and almost became Queen of England until she was ousted by Wallace Simpson and her "geisha techniques".

Interested? Let me see if I can start you off by finding out - well, first off, if that's her real name - and how much is available on-line about her, and see if she can't suck you in BIGTIME!

Got her: her name was really Beryl Markham. Read about her here and see if you don't love her to death, BIGTIME!