Review: ‘Balloonomania Belles’, By Sharon Wright

Published By: Pen & Sword

Publication Date: 26th February 2018

I.S.B.N.: 9781526708342

Format: Hardback

Price: £19.99

Blurb

Balloonomania Belles reveals the astonishing stories of the fabulous female pioneers of balloon flight. More than a century before the first aeroplane women were heading for the heavens in crazy, inspired contraptions that could bring death or glory and all too often, both. Award-winning journalist Sharon Wright reveals their hair-raising adventures in a book that brings the stories of the feisty female ballooning heroines together for the first time.

Women were in the vanguard of the “Balloonomania” craze that took hold in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and swept across Europe then the world. Their exploits were a vital element of our first voyages into the sky. When women’s options were often severely limited by law and convention they managed to join the exhilarating quest for spectacle, adventure and danger among the clouds.

Many of the brightest stars of this extraordinary era of human flight were women. From the perilous ascent in 1784 by feisty French teenager Elisabeth Thible, female aeronauts have never looked back… or down. Who were these brave women who took to the air when it was such an incredibly dangerous and scandalous thing to do? Sharon Wright brings together in one book the show-stopping stories of the very first flying women.

My Review

Entertaining chronological history of the women who got in to hot air balloons almost as soon as the were invented in the late eighteenth century and who were chucking themselves out of them in the early twentieth century, for fun and money. This is the story of aristos and actresses, taken by the thought of flight and taking their places with there male contemporaries in the skies. It’s an obscure bit of history, but still fascinating. Easy to read and sufficiently detailed, this book is the place to start if you’re interested in the history of aeronautical women.

I found the incidental commentary on the changing technology involved in ballooning, the use of various gases and the development of parachutes, as well as attitudes towards women ballooners, interesting. Rather than being a strict ‘this woman was the first to do this, this woman did this’, the book covered all sorts of little details that add colour to the time period.