Yves Rees’s accessible, entertaining study blends personal experience with rich archival research into a group of disparate women who followed their passion from Australia to the United States at a time when it was relatively easy for a white woman with talent and a few connections to just show up in Hollywood or New York and get to work. They are very different women – a surfer, a dentist, a concert pianist, a nurse, a decorator, an artist, a lawyer, and a writer – all fiercely courageous trailblazers in their own way. Travelling to Tomorrow weaves their stories together in a loosely chronological shape, using deep research to ground Rees’s imagining of these women’s hopes, dreams, achievements, and disappointments.

Drawing on a wide range of sources, from personal letters and photographs to traditional historical archives, Rees brings their stories to life in a study that balances narrative energy with academic rigor. We learn not only about the impressive accomplishments of these adventurous women. Rees also opens a window into their lives, conjuring them with vivid attention to sensory experience: the way New York glittered like a fairyland to a young artist on a boat sailing up the Hudson; the butterflies in the stomach of a law student about to address her class at the University of California; the fizzy impatience of a surfer just off the boat in Honololu, charming a reporter before rushing to catch the famous waves at Waikiki.