The Correspondents: Six Women Writers on the Front Lines of World War II

I am going to Spain with the boys, Martha Gellhorn wrote. I don't know who the boys are but I am going with them.

On the front lines of the Second World War, the lives of six remarkable women intertwined: Lee Miller, the Vogue cover model and photographer who lived in Paris as Man Ray's lover before becoming a war correspondent for the magazine; Martha Gellhorn, the third wife of Ernest Hemingway and a novelist in her own right; Sigrid Schultz, an indisputably brave journalist who withstood surveillance, interrogation, and death threats in order to publish the truth from Berlin; Virginia Cowles, whose career as a 'society girl columnist' turned combat reporter began with an exclusive interview with Mussolini; Clare Hollingworth, who had almost no professional experience when she became the first correspondent to report the outbreak of World War II; and Helen Kirkpatrick, a reporter so admired by the military that at the order of General Eisenhower she was the first woman to report from an Allied war zone with equal privileges to men.

The Correspondents paints a vivid, intimate, and nuanced portrait of these pioneering women, from chasing down sources to conducting clandestine love affairs. With her riveting and meticulous history, Judith Mackrell reconsiders the narrative of the war from a new perspective.