Five years ago Miss Levitt won the Championship of the Seas in the great motor-boat race at Trouville, France, defeating all comers.
Three years ago at Brighton she won a race and created a world’s record for women of 79¾ miles per hour. The following year she broke her own record and created a new world’s record for women of 91 miles an hour.
Looking at Miss Levitt one can hardly imagine that she could drive a car at such terrific speed. The public, in its mind’s eye, no doubt figures this motor champion as a big, strapping Amazon. Dorothy Levitt is exactly, or almost so, the direct opposite of such a picture. She is the most girlish of womanly women. Slight in stature, shy and shrinking, almost timid in her everyday life, it is seeming a marvel that she can really be the woman who has done all that the records show.
And the way in which she came to be a motorist—it is a story in itself. She was from childhood a good cyclist, a good driver of horses, a rider to hounds and an excellent shot with rifle or gun. Fishing was her favourite pastime. She was quick of eye and sure of hand and nerves troubled her not at all.
A friend, owning a motor-car, paid a visit to the family in the West Country. In a very few days Dorothy Levitt had become well acquainted with the intricacies of that motor. She handled the wheel as well as the owner or his chauffeur. She attended, as a spectator, a county competition, driving the car with such skill that the attention was attracted of the manager of a big motor firm. He secured an introduction and asked her to drive one of his cars in a competition. She agreed and thus became the first Englishwoman to drive a motor-car in a public competition.
Her first prize was won a month later, and since then she has steadily mounted the tree of her chosen profession. Yet she has remained an amateur, accepting no money prizes, only medals and cups and such like trophies.
In hill climbs, endurance and speed trials she is alike invincible. At the first aerial hare-and-hounds race of balloons this year she was selected as the umpire. The most careful, as well as intrepid and fast-driving motorist, was wanted. Miss Levitt unerringly followed the hare from London to near Arundel, Sussex, and was on the spot when the first balloon among the hounds descended near the hare.
Miss Levitt has been offered many enticing professional engagements on the Continent and in the United States but prefers to remain at home and an amateur.
In appearance Dorothy Levitt looks partly French, partly Irish, with a soupçon of American. Yet she is wholly English. Of medium height, her figure is slim and very graceful. She has a very girlish but expressive face, large eyes that are brown and grey and green in varying lights, brown hair that curls, a straight nose that has the bare inclination of a saucy upward tip and a mouth which is too large. It is a charming, winning face.
The one fault of Dorothy Levitt is her modesty, almost amounting to bashfulness. One cannot get her to tell much of her many exciting adventures, particularly those of which she is the heroine. She is immensely popular, has been toasted by Royalty at German motor banquets, elected honorary member of many of the first automobile clubs in this country and on the Continent, and has a host of friends, some in the sacred circles of society, others distinguished men and women of the more Bohemian circles of art and literature, music and the drama. She is an inveterate first-nighter, wears simple but ravishing clothes and, to those who do not know her, passes as a bright butterfly of fashion.