A review by attytheresa
Desert Queen: The Extraordinary Life of Gertrude Bell: Adventurer, Adviser to Kings, Ally of Lawrence of Arabia by Janet Wallach
5.0
I started sobbing as I read the final pages describing Gertrude Bell's death and funeral. After spending most of the last week absorbed in this superb biography of her life and work in Mesopotamia (now Iraq), her death was a personal loss that cuts deep.
To him and to many others, the Khatun [the 'Lady'] was the embodiment of the British Empire, the personification of British power. She overcame the obstacles and made her mark on history, and in the end, she was what she had wanted most to be: Miss Gertrude Bell was a Person.
An aristocratic Englishwoman, courageous, curious, confident, wearing lace and silk and armed with a fur stole, large flower-bedecked hat, and a parasol, Gertrude Bell as a young woman in her 20s launched herself on a solo trip by camel across the deserts of the Middle East, learning the Arab world as no European, certainly no Brit, had ever done to that time. One of the most brilliant minds of the 20th Century, the relationships she developed on these treks through Mesopotamia prior to WWI ultimately led to her becoming a spy, a diplomat, a cartographer, and ultimately the lynchpin for the creation of the modern Middle East. In fact, the boundaries of Kuwait, Iraq, Iran, Syria, etc. were devised by Gertrude Bell. Formidable but utterly feminine, she saw herself as intellectually masculine, and certainly not a feminist. Although I would argue that whether she saw herself in that light or not, she was without a doubt a feminist, in spite of her anti-suffrage stance! Gertrude was also a workaholic and often intensely lonely and isolated; her greatest regret was never having married and borne children. Gertrude mostly looked at other women with disdain, most of her female contacts being the wives of the political appointees to Baghdad or of the Arab sheikhs. Yet, for all her impatience at these women's shallowness and lack of spirit, she did much to improve the lot of Arabian women with education, health care and western ideas. Gertrude surrounded herself with men whom she considered her intellectual equals.
In fact, these contradictions make her incredibly human and thus someone who you can understand, champion, deplore; in short, invest several days reading about. It doesn't hurt that Wallach's research involved an incredible wealth of primary research materials, including interviews with a few men who actually knew Gertrude (this was originally published in 1996, making the period of her research prior to the Iraq War and a time when some who knew her would still be alive if quite old). And aside from all she accomplished politically in Mesopotamia, there is so much more: her love or archeology and history, particularly of Mesopotamia, ultimately led to her establishment of the Baghdad Museum, renowned for its antiquities, that was destroyed just a dozen years or so ago during the Iraq War. She was an avid mountaineer, with a peak in the Alps named for her as she was one of the first to scale it. An avid flower gardener, she brought many species of flowers, like daffodils to Baghdad, being the first to plant them there. And as her story is told, her travels go from ship and camel to horseback, car and airplane. Extraordinary.
But it isn't just the story of Gertrude herself that so captivated me. Wallach does a superb job of painting the historical and political scene in which Gertrude lived and worked, particularly once she committed herself to Mesopotamia. Wallach succeeds in making accessible the complex tribal relationships, the exotic names, and shifting allegiances. This is a superb primer of how the modern Middle East began.
ATY#44
To him and to many others, the Khatun [the 'Lady'] was the embodiment of the British Empire, the personification of British power. She overcame the obstacles and made her mark on history, and in the end, she was what she had wanted most to be: Miss Gertrude Bell was a Person.
An aristocratic Englishwoman, courageous, curious, confident, wearing lace and silk and armed with a fur stole, large flower-bedecked hat, and a parasol, Gertrude Bell as a young woman in her 20s launched herself on a solo trip by camel across the deserts of the Middle East, learning the Arab world as no European, certainly no Brit, had ever done to that time. One of the most brilliant minds of the 20th Century, the relationships she developed on these treks through Mesopotamia prior to WWI ultimately led to her becoming a spy, a diplomat, a cartographer, and ultimately the lynchpin for the creation of the modern Middle East. In fact, the boundaries of Kuwait, Iraq, Iran, Syria, etc. were devised by Gertrude Bell. Formidable but utterly feminine, she saw herself as intellectually masculine, and certainly not a feminist. Although I would argue that whether she saw herself in that light or not, she was without a doubt a feminist, in spite of her anti-suffrage stance! Gertrude was also a workaholic and often intensely lonely and isolated; her greatest regret was never having married and borne children. Gertrude mostly looked at other women with disdain, most of her female contacts being the wives of the political appointees to Baghdad or of the Arab sheikhs. Yet, for all her impatience at these women's shallowness and lack of spirit, she did much to improve the lot of Arabian women with education, health care and western ideas. Gertrude surrounded herself with men whom she considered her intellectual equals.
In fact, these contradictions make her incredibly human and thus someone who you can understand, champion, deplore; in short, invest several days reading about. It doesn't hurt that Wallach's research involved an incredible wealth of primary research materials, including interviews with a few men who actually knew Gertrude (this was originally published in 1996, making the period of her research prior to the Iraq War and a time when some who knew her would still be alive if quite old). And aside from all she accomplished politically in Mesopotamia, there is so much more: her love or archeology and history, particularly of Mesopotamia, ultimately led to her establishment of the Baghdad Museum, renowned for its antiquities, that was destroyed just a dozen years or so ago during the Iraq War. She was an avid mountaineer, with a peak in the Alps named for her as she was one of the first to scale it. An avid flower gardener, she brought many species of flowers, like daffodils to Baghdad, being the first to plant them there. And as her story is told, her travels go from ship and camel to horseback, car and airplane. Extraordinary.
But it isn't just the story of Gertrude herself that so captivated me. Wallach does a superb job of painting the historical and political scene in which Gertrude lived and worked, particularly once she committed herself to Mesopotamia. Wallach succeeds in making accessible the complex tribal relationships, the exotic names, and shifting allegiances. This is a superb primer of how the modern Middle East began.
ATY#44