There is no telling how many girls in the last 50 years fixed their sights on journalism in the hope of becoming Martha Gellhorn duplicates. Throughout her extraordinary career, Gellhorn epitomised the glamorous female reporter to the point of caricature - a powerful and respected writer on serious subjects, a blonde bombshell with a vigorous love life who mingled with the famous and important.
She covered more major events in 20th-century history than most people lived through, from the Depression and Spanish Civil War through Vietnam, the Six Day War, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Panama. In between dispatches she wrote a score of books and, luckily for her biographer, Carl Rollyson, reams of opinionated letters.
She also travelled incessantly, took many lovers - among them H.G. Wells - and married three times. Her second husband, Ernest Hemingway, was the only one she was bitter about. The first she found merely disappointing, and the third boring. When she died at 89 in 1998, Gellhorn was almost 90 years old but "continued to cast her spell over a coterie of young admirers until the end", we are told.
In no way spellbound himself, Rollyson is an admirer with astute critical reservations. He has pursued a fascination with "the feisty, outspoken Martha" to produce the only two biographies of her. The first, more limited version, was in 1990. Gellhorn opposed it, and would certainly have opposed the second.
It's easy to see why. Under Rollyson's careful scrutiny, the legend that was Gellhorn often emerges in person as an old-fashioned hellcat. Vaulting ambition was only the half of it; vanity, spite, cunning, deceit, and a fairly frequent lash of callous disregard played a large part in her life. She had sentimental vagaries, a penchant for threatening legal action, and pet hates, such as much of the feminist movement.
Yet she was a friend for life to some, an intelligent and witty companion to many, and she remained all her life a passionate voice for the world's powerless and exploited, fearless in her determination to tell their stories and contemptuous of cover-up and cant. If ever there was a woman who thirsted after justice, it was Martha Gellhorn.
If the contradictions were bred in her background, it isn't apparent. Both her mother and grandmother were independent women committed to social issues, and Martha was expected to follow tradition when she was packed off from St Louis, Missouri, to the expensive and progressive east coast women's college, Bryn Mawr. She dropped out after three years, impatient to begin "real life" as a journalist. By 1934, she had survived small town newspapers, life in Paris, travel through Europe and her first marriage.
Back in the US, she decided her energies could be best expended by reporting on the victims of the Depression. With a little exaggeration of her journalistic experience, she got a job as a field investigator in the Roosevelt administration's federal relief organisation.
What she saw touring the farms and textile towns was fictionalised in The Trouble I've Seen, the book that jolted America and made her justly famous. The experience also politicised her: "she stormed back to Washington full of `blood and thunder"', Rollyson writes.
It took President and Mrs Roosevelt to talk her out of resigning in protest at the inadequacy of the government's programme. When she was eventually fired by the FBI for inciting men waiting for a shipment of shovels to fling bricks through the windows of the local federal relief office, the Roosevelts took her into the White House.
As she started, so Gellhorn went on. After World War Two, she settled in London, in that it was for the rest of her life "home"; in fact, she went on travelling and writing well into her 80s.
She knew her journalistic strength lay in writing as a witness rather than an analyst, but her fictional work attempted something more reflective, without much lasting success. Her professional life always came first, but Rollyson argues that she pursued hero figures as obsessively as she pursued causes, with even less success - and the detailed account of her corrosive relationship with Hemingway seems to bear that out. No doubt she would have hated Rollyson's book. But he has done honour to her in establishing her place in history, and given the rest of us the gift of an absorbing account of a life spent at the centre of a century's turmoil.
Mary Maher is a freelance journalist