The Trouble I've Seen
The next book, two years later, and the one that made her reputation.
Read our take
What Mad Pursuit
Her first novel, at twenty-five, and the one she spent the rest of her life leaving out.
- 1934
About Martha Gellhorn
The story, briefly
Spoiler-freeThree young women leave college and go looking for work, meaning, and sex, and mostly find disappointment; one of them contracts a venereal disease. Four publishers turned it down as too bold for a young woman before Frederick A. Stokes took it in 1934. Reviewers who noticed it were unkind, it was never reprinted, and Gellhorn afterwards tended to omit it from lists of her own books. It is included here because it is the first thing she published as a novelist and because her later reticence about it is part of the record.
The story, in more detail
Three young women leave a women's college in the early thirties and go looking for the life they have been told is waiting. Charis leaves after her friend Sue is expelled for spending a night at a neighbouring men's college — the man is not punished — and Judith follows her out. What the three of them find is work that does not pay, men who do not stay, and a decade with no particular use for them.
Gellhorn was twenty-five and writing directly against The Sun Also Rises and the imitators it had produced. The lost generation in this novel is not glamorous, the expatriate poet is a disaster rather than a figure, and the people who pay for the freedom are the women. She spent the rest of her life leaving the book off her bibliography.
The full plot
Sue's expulsion is the book's opening argument: she is sent down for a night the man walks away from. Charis and Judith leave with her, and the three go into the thirties knowing what the terms are.
Sue's life in New York is short and reckless. She takes up with Ian Bradmore, an expatriate poet, then marries a man called Ross. Judith drifts into an affair with Ross, understanding that he will never marry her; it ends when he returns to Europe. Charis works for a while as a reporter in Pennsylvania, then goes to Paris, where she loses her virginity to a Romanian law student named Fene and contracts syphilis.
How it ends — spoilers ahead
Sue leaves her husband for an evening with Ian, and Ian kills her and then himself. Charis, diagnosed, cannot marry Michael, the man she loves; he and Judith leave together and appear headed for the settled future the novel has withheld from everyone else. The last movement stays with Charis, who does not collapse. She goes upstairs, first hurriedly and then, in the book's phrase, with due dignity, to face the illness alone. Nothing is cured and no one is reconciled, and the closing note is nearer resolve than despair.
Why we recommend it
The book before the reporting
Written before Spain, before the dispatches, before the voice everyone recognises. It shows what she sounded like without it.
Rejected as too bold
Four publishers passed on the manuscript for its frankness about sex. That is a fact about 1934 publishing as much as about the book.
A record she preferred to drop
Writers editing their own past is an ordinary thing that rarely leaves this clear a trace.
What this book explores
Timeline
1931–1933
Traveling across Europe in her early twenties, Gellhorn pours the pacifist-youth movement and her own restlessness into the manuscript, written against The Sun Also Rises and its imitators.
1934
After four publishers turn it down as too bold for a young woman, Frederick A. Stokes publishes her debut in New York to harsh reviews; she spends the rest of her life leaving it off her bibliography, and it is never reprinted.
Book editions
Hardcover
- Hardcover
- Frederick A. Stokes Company
- 1934
Reader reviews
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What Mad Pursuit: frequently asked questions
Who wrote What Mad Pursuit?
Martha Gellhorn. It was her first novel, published in 1934.
What is What Mad Pursuit about?
Three young women leave college and go looking for work, meaning, and sex, and mostly find disappointment — one of them contracts a venereal disease.
Was What Mad Pursuit controversial?
Yes. Four publishers turned it down as too bold for a young woman before Frederick A. Stokes took it in 1934.
Is it autobiographical?
It draws on the restlessness and disappointments of Gellhorn's own early twenties.
Where does it sit in her career?
It is her first book — before the Depression reporting and the wars that made her name.