Learning to Fly: A Writer’s Memoir

Two years before her death, Mary Lee Settle sat down to trace the way that led me into the writer I have been for fifty years . The result is this memoir, which picks up her life where Addie (1998) left it, with a girl turning twenty, in love with the language of Shakespeare and determined to be an actress. In 1938 her mother sends Mary Lee off to a theatre apprenticeship, setting her on a road few women of that era would have dared to travel.The road will lead to serious, uncompromised writing and over twenty books, including The Beulah Quintet . The adventures along the way-from the glamour of New York during the World’s Fair to the terrors of London during the Blitz - will delight, inform and alarm the reader of this thoroughly modern Canterbury Tale.