The Queen of Whale Cay: The Eccentric Story of 'Joe' Carstairs, Fastest Woman on Water

"I was never entirely honest to anyone except for Wadley"
By sally tarbox on 18 April 2017
Format: Kindle Edition
An interesting biography of Marian Barbara ('Joe') Carstairs, daughter of a wealthy but dysfunctional family.
After leaving boarding school, Joe adopts a male persona, and after serving as a driver in the Great War, gets caught up in the 'anything goes' world of the Bright Young Things. When her grandmother dies, she is able to indulge her passion for speed, building and racing boats, before her ultimate challenge - buying her own island in the Bahamas, and running it as her own private country. ("I didn't make improvements...there was nothing there.I just made what I wanted.")

A difficult character to really understand, show more Carstairs is simultaneously permissive - wild parties, countless lovers - and strait-laced when it comes to supervising her black employees' lives. The author sees her as a Peter Pan type, in her own Neverland, 'a boy who never had to grow up', and I admit to being fazed by the close relationship she seems to have had with her doll, Lord Tod Wadley. As she is so hard to comprehend, perhaps the reader comes away still bemused by her personality, but nonetheless a very interesting read. show less

I loved this book. What an incredible character Carstairs was; speed racer on sea and land, self styled pirate, hunter, womaniser, benevolent dictator (mostly) of her own island kingdom, trickster and loyal supporter of those she felt had supported her. I like to think I'd love to have met her, but in truth she'd probably have frightened the pants off me. Summerscale paints a vivid portrait of an eccentric and complicated woman, who invented and reinvented her persona and in part lived vicariously through her constant companion, a male doll she dubbed Lord Tod Wadley. Highly recommended.

This would have made an interesting news article, but I felt that the book stretched the story too far.

"Joe" Carstairs is essentially unknowable, because she never really let anyone close enough to know her. And from this book she seemed to me afraid to know herself too deeply. She really stuck by her motto of living in the moment.

I think she struggled with knowing whether people were with her for the money or for herself. So she decided to get in first and make it about the money, but she was very generous with her money and life-long loyal to the people she did care about.

I skipped through the pages of poetry and repetitious pages comparing Joe to Peter Pan.

At the end Joe struck me as a rather lonely figure who was perhaps afraid to show more really grow up. You wonder what would have happened to her if she hadn't had pots of money. With some of her antics she'd have either been in prison or a psychiatric ward. show less

This was one of those great finds that I sometimes unearth at the dollar store - the story of "Joe" Carstairs, a wealthy transgender who became famous for racing speedboats and later, buying her own private island in the Bahamas where she constructed her own society living openly with other women/

This was a fascinating look at someone who, if not for her money would have been thought deviant at the time. Instead, she was merely regarded as eccentric.

I liked the subject of this biography so much that I was almost able to ignore the writing. It was patchy, jumpy, and odd. There were bits that made me roll my eyes, and bits that made me hiss- mostly assumptions on the part of the author. I'd like to read an in-depth biography of Carstairs by a genuine biographer rather than an obituary writer, I think, but I'm glad I read this one.

I read this book when it first came out, so it's been awhile. I can say for certain that it made an impression on me! This lady was BIZARRE, not in a really creepy way but in a kind of cool way. I love reading about people who have enough money to indulge an eccentric whim. I love the doll thing- weeeeeird! I mean, look at the photo on the cover of this book. Who gets a professional to photograph you and your doll?

"The Queen of Whale Cay" was "Joe" Carstairs, a cross-dresser with an extraordinary life-story which Kate Summerscale tells in this book. It must have been rather a challenge at times, as one gets the impression that reasonable chunks of Carstairs' life were very poorly documented. As a result, the earlier chapters of the book feel rather stilted, with bald statements of fact coupled with Summerscale desperately theorising on motivations and emotions, and side-notes on companions which feel like they are there only to bulk up the first part of the book. Latterly, however, as Carstairs purchases Whale Cay and the documentation presumably picks up, the writing also improves. Despite the flaws, this is generally a pretty enjoyable read, show more although it is difficult not to be sad at the ultimate isolation of Carstairs and how challenging she obviously found real human relationships. show less