The Memoirs of Violet Jessop, Who Survived Both the TITANIC and BRITANNIC Disasters
By Violet Jessop
Introduced, edited, and annotated by John Maxtone-Graham
272 pp. 35 b&w photos and documents. 1997. Hardcover. $23.95
ISBN 1 57409 035 6
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Following a childhood in Argentina and formative years in England, Violet Jessop spent her entire career at sea. She was a stewardess for first-class passengers on the TITANIC, and, four years later, served as a nurse aboard the hospital ship BRITANNIC when it struck a mine and sank to the bottom of the Aegean Sea. She went on to write this unique and riveting eyewitness account of both disasters, weaving into her story many fascinating tales of fellow stewards, wartime alarums, impossible passengers, philandering shipmates, exotic ports, and tragic deaths. Her powerful memoir grants the reader a unique vantage point that could only come from a survivor.
"Jessop has added a fresh, indispensable chapter to the legend of the TITANIC that buffs and historians will find invaluable." —Publishers Weekly
"The book is wonderfully well constructed and written — it is wry, witty and painfully honest." —Hampstead and Highgate Express
"Her book about seaborne life is riveting, the passages about the disaster itself, chilling." —East Anglian Daily Times
"A number of her memories as a crew member for 42 years at sea, primarily as a stewardess, are amusing and interesting, especially anecdotes about passengers and crews of the ships she served on....her dramatic experiences produced striking literary touches in her writing." —USA Today
"...many books on the subject are being published, but few can match this survivor's firsthand account in imparting a sense of immediacy....Readers of this absorbing account of her untrammeled life will agree that 'ostensibly unsinkable in life, she has proved positively unsinkable posthumously.' An important contribution to the growing body of TITANIC literature." —ALA Booklist
"...anti-heroic and unromanticised truth-telling...makes this memoir valuable....simple sensations recorded so directly bring us zooming up to a powerful tight close-up on one corner of that simultaneously over-familiar and unimaginably terrible scene....Jessop was clearly as kind and pretty and dutiful as any sentimentalist could wish, but she was also honest and sharp enough to make this memoir an enjoyable as well as a useful addition to the historical record." —London Sunday Times
"I do not welcome ever more books on the TITANIC, but the memoirs of a stewardess on board about that ship and the era, about her life and work in several more famous liners, her childhood and upbringing in Argentina, her courageous and matter-of-fact handling of hardships make a human story and historical vignette that needs no TITANIC hype. But if that makes more people read it, so much the better, for through her own accomplished writing and Maxtone-Graham's perceptive annotations, one grows to love Violet Jessop." —Lloyds List
"Jessop writes with an easy and enviable felicity of insufferable charges ('The haughty, gimlet eyes of a certain well-known society woman'), the unwanted gropings from the male staff, her cramped quarters ('so small that one move suddenly meant disaster to some part of one's anatomy'). Jessop ably conveys the complex passenger/steward relationship, which combined discreet social intimacy with a factotum's talent for handling all exigencies of shipboard life. She is also gently droll....The horror of the foundering TITANIC...comes at the reader full force, as does the sinking of the hospital ship BRITANNIC....Throughout, editor Maxtone-Graham provides unobtrusive and enormously helpful annotations on ports, protocols, and additional tidbits of biography. Jessop was poised and graceful as a stewardess. She displays the same qualities as a writer." —Kirkus Reviews
- To read a selection from this title, please visit our Excerpts page.
About the Author:
Violet Jessop joined the ORINOCO in 1908, at the age of 21. Save for wartime spells ashore, she served as a cabin stewardess until her retirement forty-two years later. She lived a life of uncommon travel and adventure. Her literary canvas is as broad as the seven seas and her shipboard palette as vivid.
About the Editor:
John Maxtone-Graham edited and annotated Violet Jessop's memoir. A marine historian, he is the author of several passenger ship classics, including Liners to the Sun and Crossing & Cruising. He interviewed Jessop in 1970 while doing research for his book The Only Way to Cross. She died a year later, leaving the manuscript to her nieces. It is now published for the first time.
Also by John Maxtone-Graham