The Queen of Whale Cay
The Extraordinary Story of ‘Joe’ Carstairs, the Fastest Woman on Water
‘A wonderful account of a truly extraordinary life’ Mail on Sunday
Born in 1900 to a promiscuous American oil heiress and a British army captain, Marion Barbara Carstairs realised very early on that she was not like most little girls.
Liberated by war work in WWI, Marion reinvented herself as Joe, and quickly went on to establish herself as a leading light of the fashionable lesbian demi-monde. She dressed in men’s clothes, smoked cigars and cheroots, tattooed her arms, and became Britain’s most celebrated female speed-boat racer – the ‘fastest woman on water’.
Yet Joe tired of the lime-light in 1934, and retired to the Bahamian Island of Whale Cay. There she fashioned her own self-sufficient kingdom, where she hosted riotous parties which boasted Hollywood actresses and British royalty among their guests. Although her lovers included screen sirens such as Marlene Dietrich, the real love of Joe’s life was a small boy-doll named Lord Tod Wadley, to whom she remained devoted throughout her remarkable life. She died, aged 93, in 1993.
‘She was crazy and brave and her story is jaw-droppingly amazing … Great stuff’
Daily Mail
‘A small jewel of a biography’ New Yorker
‘A fascinating, hilarious and deliciously subversive book’ Literary Review
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First published in Great Britain 2020
This electronic edition published 2020
Copyright © Kate Summerscale, 2020
Kate Summerscale has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work
Extract from ‘As I Walked Out One Evening’ copyright © 1940 by W. H. Auden, renewed
Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd
Extract from ‘The Red Signal’ copyright © 1933 by Agatha Christie
Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd
Extract from ‘No. 16’ copyright © Elizabeth Bowen 1939
Reproduced with permission of Curtis Brown Group Ltd, London on behalf of The Beneficiaries of the Estate of Elizabeth Bowen
Extract from ‘The Dry Salvages’ copyright © 1941 by T. S. Eliot
Reproduced by permission of Faber & Faber Ltd
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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN: HB: 978-1-4088-9545-0; TPB: 978-1-4088-9544-3; EBOOK: 978-1-4088-9543-6; SIGNED SPECIAL EDITION: 978-1-5266-3105-3
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