Lady Mary Heath Joins the Party (AFW Jul-Sep 2026)
This article was published in the July – September 2026 issue of Aviation for Women Magazine.
When I think of all that WAI has unlocked for me, I’m almost too overwhelmed to express it. I was primed for the connection the annual conferences offered when I first attended in 2009. I was twelve years into my aviation career by then, and I’d already begun spinning my own network with no mentor or map to follow. The conference helped me see a wider world of aviation beyond my small sisterhood of barely a hundred other women pilots and a handful of aircrew. But the Pioneer Hall of Fame, Women Military Aviators flight suit socials, and, especially, the authors corner, predecessor to Authors Connect, took my imagination much farther, connecting me to the women who came before us.
Studying our collective experiences has been like watching an epic cinematic saga unfold. Patterns have emerged: interconnectedness, rising and falling action, plenty of drama, and, oh, the fascinating cast of characters! Gradually, in a cosmic paradigm shift, I began to see myself inside this spectacle, a minor character on the grand stage that is women in aviation. I am a part of it. And so are you.
Sometimes I like to imagine I’m at one giant annual WAI conference where every woman whose industry or interest ever touched a machine that touched the sky from across our collective history is there, ready to mentor, to learn, to complain, to uplift, and to party. Yes, I imagine I am at one epic, spectacular, anachronistic cocktail party with all of you and all of them, working the room—laughing, crying, high-fiving, and occasionally asking some confronting questions of our pioneering women.
At this party, some of those pioneers are more animated than others. They are fully flesh and blood, complete with attitudes and opinions and a voice I can even hear in my head. Others are merely cardboard cutouts, placeholders for women I know existed, but who I haven’t come to know well enough to interact with my overactive imagination. Until recently, one of those cutouts wore the label Sophia Theresa Catherine Mary Pierce-Evans, better known to aviation history as Lady Mary Heath.
In our Literary Aviatrix Classics conversations, Dr. Jacque Boyd, Captain Jenny Beatty, and I have met Lady Heath through her friendships and encounters with various other figures, including Ruth Nichols, and, especially, Elinor Smith. In our most recent conversation, we sought to learn more about her through her own words in an out-of-print book coauthored by journalist Stella Wolfe Murray, Woman and Flying. As is the case with a fair number of works written by our pioneers, we learned much about the context of the times, the attitudes and imaginations about flying, and lived pioneering adventures vicariously through their accounts, but did not learn much about the emotional core of Lady Heath.
The well-researched Lady Icarus: The Life of Irish Aviator Lady Mary Heath and a two-volume history of Irish pioneering women in aviation, Petticoat Pilots, offer more, but are expensive and hard to get a hold of. But now, thanks to the imagination, research, and creativity of Irish author June O’Sullivan, we have a wonderful new biographical fiction of Lady Heath in the novel The Sky is Not Enough.
O’Sullivan opens the book with a flashback to Lady Heath’s traumatic beginnings, then introduces us to the widow Sophie Elliot-Lynn on the hunt for her next wealthy husband to support her flying adventures and ultimately fund her historic flight the length of Africa from Cape Town to Cairo. Thanks to the fictional format, we live this adventure from a fully fleshed Lady Heath’s perspective that hits exactly the notes I might imagine from what I’ve been able to glean about the Lady herself. Thanks to O’Sullivan, Lady Heath has stepped out of her cardboard cutout placeholder and has joined the party, gin and tonic in one hand, cigarette in another. Let’s go introduce ourselves.
Buy the book: The Sky is Not Enough
Join us in the Aviatrix Book Club in March 2027 to discuss!
