Book Review: Gift from the Sea, by Anne Morrow Lindbergh (1955, 20th anniversary edition published in 1975)

 

My 20th anniversary edition paperback of Gift from the Sea, by Anne Morrow Lindbergh (1955, 20th anniversary edition published in 1975) photo by Mark C. Taylor.

Writer, poet, and aviator Anne Morrow Lindbergh, 1906-2001.

Charles Lindbergh and Anne Morrow Lindbergh, 1931. Anne served as Charles' navigator and co-pilot on many flights. 

Anne Morrow Lindbergh was the wife of American aviator Charles Lindbergh, and an acclaimed author in her own right. Her most famous book is Gift from the Sea, which became a surprise bestseller upon its publication in 1955. It’s a slim volume of essays, using different types of seashells as metaphors for life.

I recently finished reading a fantastic biography of Charles Lindbergh, The Rise and Fall of Charles Lindbergh, by Candace Fleming, and that inspired me to pull out my copy of Gift from the Sea that I had picked up from a Little Free Library a couple of years ago. I found it to be a compelling little book. Gift from the Sea can be connected to the feminist movement, as Morrow Lindbergh writes about the role of women in American life. She writes of all the different obligations on women: “What a circus act we women perform every day of our lives. It puts the trapeze artist to shame.” (p.26) Later in the book she writes, “All her instinct as a woman—the eternal nourisher of children, of men, of society—demands that she give. Her time, her energy, her creativeness drain out into these channels if there is any chance, any leak.” (p.45)

Gift from the Sea is also a spiritual book, as Morrow Lindbergh is interested in how women can nourish their souls. She writes: “Only when one is connected to one’s own core is one connected to others, I am beginning to discover. And, for me, the core, the inner spring, can best be refound through solitude.” (p.44)

Morrow Lindbergh is writing about what might now be called “self-actualization.” One of my favorite quotes in the book is this one: “The most exhausting thing in life, I have discovered, is being insincere. That is why so much of social life is exhausting; one is wearing a mask.” (p.32)

In Gift from the Sea, Morrow Lindbergh describes a hypothetical perfect day. It’s interesting that her perfect day is spent with her sister, rather than with her husband Charles. That’s emblematic of the Lindbergh’s marriage, which had its difficulties, to put it mildly. Charles Lindbergh was always a seeker, a wanderer, and his job as an aviation consultant took him away from home for long stretches at a time. That was obviously the way Charles wanted it. He even fathered several children with 3 German women in the years after Gift from the Sea was published. Anne did not learn about these families during Charles’ lifetime. Despite it all, it was Anne who was at Charles’ side as he succumbed to cancer in 1974.

Gift from the Sea is a book that anyone can still gain something useful and valuable from, as all of us try to find inner peace and calm in a world that seems much faster-paced than 1955.