The story of Aloha Wanderwell, an early 20th-century adventurer raised in Qualicum Beach, BC, the first woman to drive around the world – at age 18 – is captured by Victoria Jewish community member Laurel Corona in her newly released novel, Aloha Wanderwell Takes the Wheel.
“I guess I’ve always been a bit of a rebel at heart, and I love stories of women who defied expectations and went off and lived an exciting life on their own terms. Aloha Wanderwell is certainly one of those,” said Corona. “I ran across her in a little book about interesting women in Vancouver Island history. By the time I got to the end of that little three-page profile, I was hooked.”
Born Idris Hall in Winnipeg, Man., in 1906, the family moved to Vancouver Island then to England, Belgium and France. She ran away from her French boarding school in Nice at age 16, changed her name to Aloha and joined the around-the-world automobile expedition of Walter “Cap” Wanderwell. She and Cap eventually married and continued their travels, driving the length of Africa and, on another expedition, across South America, managing to cross the Andes in cars with engines the same size as a ride-on lawnmower today – in an era where there were rarely any defined roads.
The couple intended to continue their adventures by boat, but just before they were set to sail, Cap was murdered aboard their yacht, ending 10 years of travel across five continents.
“But it’s not just about the travel, which was arduous, painful and often terrifying,” Corona said. “My novel is about a teenager coming into a full realization of her power as a woman in the most remarkable of circumstances.”
According to Corona, the key dynamic in the book is Aloha’s relationship with Cap. Ten years older at 26, he was charismatic and wily in how he got around any difficulty that stood in the way. Cap made money for the expedition by making films of their travels and showing them for the price of admission as they went from place to place.
“She was beautiful and statuesque (almost six feet tall) and, over time, it was Aloha the audiences came to see. Over the 10 years they were together, they became quite famous, and she grew from a teenager into a woman confident of her own capabilities and powers,” Corona said.
“She and Cap married a few years into their relationship, mostly to provide legitimacy to their traveling together, but, for me, I think her desire to be wanted, protected and safe left her feeling disappointed with him. The book goes into her issues with abandonment and betrayal by the people closest to her, and I don’t think she was ever sure enough of his love to give hers fully to him.”
Cap, Corona said, could not see beyond his own desires to concern himself with anyone else’s. Their life together ended with his murder in Long Beach, Calif.; how the relationship would have worked out is something that will never be known.
Though she achieved fame a century ago, the story of Aloha Wanderwell is not widely known. When Corona retells the story, audiences express shock that they had not heard about her adventures. Yet, Corona is not surprised.
“History is loaded with women who were out doing amazing things and doing them as well or better than the men around them,” she said. “This has always been inconvenient to those committed to a male-dominated telling of history, and it is only in recent decades that this limited view of history has been enthusiastically rejected by women historians, writers and other thinkers and doers, not all of whom are female.
“In Aloha Wanderwell Takes the Wheel, I decided to mix into a narrative that is mostly in the third person two first-person narrations, one by Aloha’s sister, and one by the detective assigned to the murder investigation of Cap,” Corona said. “I also structured the book around two time frames. The first-person narrations are the way the story of the murder through the verdict in the trial of the suspect is told. The third-person narration provides the backstory of Aloha’s adventures, which forms the bulk of the book.”
Corona is the author of four other historical novels – The Four Seasons: A Novel of Vivaldi’s Venice, Penelope’s Daughter, Finding Emilie and The Mapmaker’s Daughter – focusing on women forgotten or misrepresented in history. She has written one work of non-fiction: Until Our Last Breath: A Holocaust Story of Love and Partisan Resistance.
Corona believes her next book, The Intuitive, coming in April 2027, will be of particular interest to Jewish readers. Set in New York in the 1910s and 1920s, the character is a socialite who has lost her husband and son in an accident and is non-functional with grief.
Thinking it may help her recovery, she accepts an offer to go to Ellis Island with renowned eugenicist Henry H. Goddard, to assist in identifying “feebleminded” people, so they can be deported before (presumably) they bring inferior genes into the United States.
“She quickly develops moral qualms about what she has done and, in her efforts to atone for one Jewish family she harmed, she becomes aware of all the social issues her wealth has insulated her from,” Corona said. “The book is the story of her growth from the snobbery, bigotry and antisemitism of her social class into a remarkable woman making genuine contributions to causes affecting women, like suffrage, unions and birth control, and filling her life with love again.”
Corona encourages readers to buy books from independent bookstores to help keep them in business.
Sam Margolis has written for the Globe and Mail, the National Post, UPI and MSNBC.