From the New Yorker article on Amelia Earhart by Judith Thurman (September 14, 2009)
[From Earhart’s letter to her husband on her wedding day]
You must know again my reluctance to marry, my feeling that I shatter thereby chances in work which mean so much to me. … In our life together I shall not hold you to any medieval code of faithfulness to me, nor shall I consider myself bound to you similarly. … I may have to keep some place where I can go to be myself now and then, for I cannot guarantee to endure at all the confinements of even an attractive cage.
Thurman writes in the article, “Amelia knew that there were no idylls, especially between men and women. Yet the ending [of her life] rings true. It is one that she herself tried to write. She abandons everything, and flies away.”