Anne Morrow Lindbergh, who blazed air routes with her husband, Charles, at the dawn of commercial aviation and was one of the past century's most important and popular American women writers and diarists, died on February 7th aged 94.
At various times in a remarkable life, Anne Lindbergh was the most envied, pitied and hated woman in America. She married Charles Lindbergh at the peak of his fame, two years after his solo, non-stop flight across the Atlantic in 1927.
Under his tutelage, she became an accomplished co-pilot, navigator and radio operator and the first American woman licensed to fly a glider. Accompanying her husband on 40,000 miles of exploratory flights around the world in the early 1930s, often while she was pregnant, Anne Lindbergh eased public fears about flying and helped map routes still used by commercial airlines today.
A few years after her marriage, the couple became a universal object of sympathy when their first child was kidnapped and murdered.
Her long fall from grace was caused by her 1940 book, The Wave of the Future, which argued against American involvement in the second World War. Like her husband, whose isolationist views she mirrored, Anne Lindbergh was condemned as a pro-Nazi traitor, a reputation that took years to fade.
Yet out of this crucible came 13 books, several of which were best-sellers. The most enduring of these was Gift From the Sea, a meditation on the often conflicting roles of women that anticipated the contemporary feminist movement by more than a decade. It was inspired by Anne Lindbergh's own struggle for identity in a marriage dominated by her charismatic, yet sternly controlling spouse.
Anne Spencer Morrow was born on June 22nd, 1906, in Englewood, New Jersey. Her father was Dwight Whitney Morrow, a US senator, diplomat, and partner in New York's J.P. Morgan and Co. Her mother, Elizabeth, was a poet and educator.
During a Christmas break from Smith College in 1927, Anne Lindbergh travelled to Mexico, where her father was US ambassador. Charles Augustus Lindbergh was the Morrows' guest.
A year later, Lindbergh began his courtship in a plane over Long Island. On May 27th, 1929, the former Minnesota farm boy and the ambassador's daughter were married. The only place the Lindberghs could escape the prying eyes of the public was in the air. So, for the first few years, they made it their home, conducting survey flights for Transcontinental Air Transport, which later became Trans World Airlines.
On Easter morning in 1930, Anne Lindbergh helped her husband break the transcontinental speed record, flying from Los Angeles to New York in less than 15 hours.
On March 1st, 1932, their son Charles was kidnapped from his crib in the second-storey nursery and for 10 weeks the couple lived between hope and despair. Charles's body was discovered on May 12th, 1932, in a shallow grave a few miles from their home. An unemployed Bronx carpenter, Bruno Richard Hauptmann, was tried and convicted for the crime in 1935 and executed the following year.
Anne Lindbergh began to emerge from the shadows when her first book, North to the Orient, was published in 1935. An account of the Lindberghs' 1931 flight to China via Canada and Alaska to chart a new commercial air route, it became an instant best-seller.
Her next book, Listen! the Wind, told the story of their 1933 survey flight to Europe. By this time, however, America's disenchantment with its top aviator had begun. Charles Lindbergh had made favourable statements about German air power and received a medal from the German government, presented by Hermann Goering. In late 1939, he gave his first speech against American involvement in the war.
Despite rising attacks on their patriotism and calls on Lindbergh to return the Nazi medal, the Lindberghs even considered moving to Berlin, but later chose Paris instead.
Anne Lindbergh was a pacifist, but shared her husband's opinion that the war would diminish US power and destroy most of Western civilisation. Her book, The Wave of the Future, was a muddled attempt to explain her position to the American public.
In 1972, Anne Lindbergh began to publish her diaries and letters. After her husband's death in 1974, she divided her time between Switzerland and the family home in Darien, Connecticut, where the five Lindbergh children were raised. In one of her last interviews in 1980, Anne Lindbergh spoke of her dismay at her husband's anti-Jewish remarks four decades earlier. "It was terribly stupid."
Anne Spencer Morrow Lindbergh: born 1906; died, February 2001