"Young Woman and the Sea" by Glenn Stout

"Young Woman and the Sea" by Glenn Stout is the September pick for my Childless Collective Nomo Book Club.

First published in 2009, and re-issued in conjunction with a 2022 Disney movie version starring Daisy Ridley -- the book is credited with acquainting a whole new generation with the remarkable story of Gertrude "Trudy" Ederle, and how she became the first woman to swim the English Channel in 1926. (I finished this book almost 100 years to the day of Ederle's famous swim.) 

I vaguely remembered Ederle's name from childhood reading about famous women and Olympic athletes. I assumed she was British (she swam the ENGLISH Channel, after all...?), but she was actually an American of German descent.  Beyond being a great personal story, it's also the kind of deep dive into social history that I love, covering (among other topics) the history of swimming (going back to ancient times), and a feminist-oriented history of women in swimming and in sports generally. It might be a little more background detail than some readers might be interested in, but I found it all fascinating, and learned a lot.  

For example, I'd never heard of the 1904 tragedy of the General Slocum, which opens the book: a steamboat carrying 1,342 people to a church picnic caught fire and sank in the East River near New York City.  An estimated 1,021 people died, most of them women and children who could not swim.  It was the worst maritime disaster of the 20th century until the sinking of the Titanic a few years later, and remains the worst maritime disaster in New York City history, and the deadliest man-made disaster of any sort in the area until September 11, 2001.  

Women were considered "the weaker sex," and it was thought that any kind of physical exertion was not only improper but damaging to their health. In the wake of the tragedy of the Slocum, that began to change. New organizations sprang up to teach women to swim, alongside of other women's sports organizations. The Ederle family had a cottage at Sandy Hook, and Trudy learned to swim in the ocean waters alongside her two older sisters. She began competing and setting records when she was 12, and competed at the Olympic Games in 1924, where she won several medals. She turned professional shortly afterward, and began planning to conquer the English Channel -- a feat that only a handful of men had previously accomplished. 

The historic Channel crossing -- Ederle's second attempt -- is covered in a couple of riveting chapters near the end of the book. I found it hard to put the book down by that point, and I had tears in my eyes by the time she finally staggered out of the water onto the beach in England.

Trudy took a couple of weeks to visit her grandmother in Germany and rest before heading home to New York City, where huge crowds and one of the first big ticker tape parades awaited her. Unfortunately, by then, her momentum had started to slow, and a series of bad business decisions plus other Channel swimmers repeating her feat quickly caused her star to fade. She never managed to cash in on her accomplishment at the level she might have, but her story has served as inspiration for generations of female swimmers and other athletes in the years since then.  She never married or had children, but was happy to lead a quiet life, teaching children to swim.  She died in 2003 at age 98 (!).  

4 stars on Goodreads & StoryGraph. 

This was Book #19 read to date in 2026 (and Book #1 finished in August). You can find reviews of all my books read to date in 2026 tagged as "2026 books."