Glasgow University's Kate McLoughlin performs a valuable service by providing a thorough and thoughtful appraisal of journalist Martha Gellhorn's life and work. Too often dismissed as “one of Hemingway's wives,” Gellhorn was, in truth, a first-rate writer and a trailblazer for women war correspondents.

McLoughlin examines journalistic standards related to Gellhorn's reportage, such as objectivity, which is a particularly slippery concept during wartime. Gellhorn's news stories, writes McLoughlin, feature “the tonal equivalent of the cold camera-eye” (75), but Gellhorn, looking back on decades of her work, noted that emotional neutrality was unrealistic. She said, “you're supposed to see death and destruction and just regard that as if you have no opinion about it. I find that absolutely mad … the idea that there is such a thing as total objectivity assumes that the human being has no feelings, has no reaction to anything and is totally cold to anything it sees, which I find impossible” (78).

Gellhorn's grappling with this professional norm also shows up in her fiction, in which her principal characters often include a woman journalist who prefers involvement to dispassionate observation, and who deals with the self-doubt that accompanied women's struggles to secure a foothold in a male-dominated field. Relying on Gellhorn's letters, fiction, and other writings, McLoughlin does a good job of analyzing the masculine–feminine divide in the news business. Gellhorn lamented the condescension she and other women reporters encountered and noted that that “women correspondents are treated too much like violets” (179). In covering conflict Gellhorn made certain that no one could think that she would shrink from reporting about horrific events. After viewing the bodies of two Frenchmen who had been tortured by the Gestapo she wrote, “I look at anything, you see, because I do not admit that one can turn away; one has no right to spare oneself” (76).

Gellhorn died in 1998, a few months short of her ninetieth birthday. She had remained a frequently cited observer of the news media, and McLoughlin notes her receding faith in “the benign power of the press” (186). Despite this concern, in various panel discussions, documentaries, and other forums Gellhorn consistently embraced the role of journalist as witness. This was a way for her to reconcile some of her doubts about objectivity. In 1996 she said, “If you can't change it you must at least record it, so that it cannot just be ignored or forgotten” (228).

That gets to the heart of the journalism of conscience that Gellhorn championed and that McLoughlin describes so well. This book is a valuable resource not only for those who are interested in Martha Gellhorn, but also for anyone who cares about journalism as a moral profession.