Lady Icarus

For a five-year period from the mid 1920s, the Limerick-born pilot Lady Mary Heath was one of the best-known women in the world. It was an era when everyone had gone aviation mad, due to the exploits of Charles Lindberg and, later, Amelia Earhart. ‘Britain’s Lady Lindy’, as she was known, made front-page news worldwide as the first pilot ever, male or female, to fly a small open-cockpit plane solo from Cape Town to London.

Never one to sit still for long, Lady Mary had already spent two years as a dispatch rider during the First World War, pioneered women’s athletics in Britain and helped introduce women’s track and field to the Olympics. Along the way, she was to travel widely and marry three times, eventually returning with her third husband, a Trinidadian, to establish her own air company in north Dublin.

Most remarkably, the woman born Sophie Peirce Evans at Knockaderry, Co. Limerick achieved all this despite the most unpromising of beginnings – when she was just a toddler, her crazed father had murdered her mother and was put away for life after a sensational trial.

Lady Icarus is the first full-length biography of one of the truly great Irish women of the 20th century. Telling the story of a woman who truly flew too close to the sun, it combines high adventure with considerable poignancy.

LINDIE NAUGHTON has been a journalist for 30 years and involved in athletics all her life. It was this interest that introduced her to the late Lady Mary Heath and eventually resulted in her biography.

One of the team that established Dublin’s Women’s Mini Marathon, Lindie has written a weekly column on athletics for 20 years, as well as being a columnist on minority sports. A keen gardener, she is also a regular contributor to a gardening magazines.

Previous books include Let’s Run; Irish Olympians 1896-1992 with Johnny Watterson; and How to Mow the Lawn, a gardening guide for beginners. Lady Icarus is the first biography she has written.