Georgina Howell was given a magazine
assignment to write a feature on her hero, someone she always admired. She knew immediately who her subject would be—Gertrude
Bell.
Bell was a linguist, a gardener, a
mountain climber, a published poet, an explorer, an author, an archaeologist, a
photographer, a cartographer, a skilled administrator, a British spy, and a
major in the British Army. Howell’s original
article about Bell grew into this scholarly, yet highly readable,
biography.
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Gertrude Bell: Queen of the Desert, Shaper of Nations
by
Georgina Howell
Farrar,
Straus & Giroux, 2006
|
In the early twentieth century, Bell was
one of the most powerful women in the British Empire and played an instrumental
role in the establishment of Iraq, yet many people in the United States have
never heard of her. More people are
familiar with her younger male contemporary, T. E. Lawrence of Arabia. Upon meeting Lawrence, Bell described him as “an
interesting boy, he will make a traveler.”
Bell was born 1868 in Yorkshire,
England, into a wealthy family, but polite society bored her. Even as a child, Bell had a restless mind and
couldn’t sit still. Her mother died when
she was a toddler, but her father remarried a woman who would raise his two children
by his first wife and go on to have children of her own. Bell’s family introduced her into society as
a debutante, practically required for a young lady in her social class, but at
the same time, her father encouraged Bell to be adventurous and supported her
desire for an education. She was the
first woman to be awarded a First in Modern History at Oxford’s Queens College.
When Bell was 30, she discovered
mountain climbing. She was average in
height at 5’5” but strong and athletic.
With the assistance of local guides, she went on to climb some of the
highest peaks in the Alps. She climbed a
13,068’ mountain in her underclothes, because there was no mountain gear for
women. When she reached her destination,
she pulled out her skirt and put it on. Later
she acquired a pair of men’s trousers for climbing. One mountain climbing expedition required
that she and her guides cut steps in the ice for 3 ½ hours. She found herself in many precarious situations
in her life, but her friends described her as fearless.
Bell spoke 6 languages fluently,
including Persian and Arabic. She wrote
eight books, including a translation and biography of the lyric poet Hafiz, one
of Persia’s most famous poets.
Bell also became interested in “hardy
gardening,” the precursor to the English gardens of today, rather than the
hothouse gardening then popular in England.
She developed a rock garden and later a water garden at the family home,
then wrote a book about it.
While Bell was accomplished in so many
areas, she never had much success in love. The first young man she fancied had
a gambling problem and died young. The
love of her life was already married. He
was later killed in WW I, but they were able to spend time together before he
went to the front. She later had an
unrequited infatuation with a young male co-worker.
Even with all her previous accomplishments,
it was Bell’s “love affair” with the vast area known as Arabia that brought her
into her own. Bell described her first sight of the desert:
Oh
the desert around Teheran! Miles and
miles of it with nothing, nothing growing; ringed in with bleak bare mountains
snow crowned and furrowed with the deep courses of torrents. I never knew what desert was till I came here;
it is a very wonderful thing to see; and suddenly in the middle of it all, out
of nothing, out of a little cold water, springs up a garden. Such a garden:
Trees, fountains, tanks, roses and a house in it, the houses which we heard of
in fairy tales when we were little: inlaid with tiny slabs of looking-glass in
lovely patterns, blue tiled, carpeted, echoing with the sound of running water
and fountains.
Bell made six extended trips to the
Middle East and later in her life lived in Baghdad. She visited cities we hear on the news—Jerusalem,
Amman, Basra, Damascus, Palmyra, Haifa, Aleppo, Istanbul, Mosul, Samarra—then ventured
into the vast uncharted miles of desert. She apparently was as skilled riding a camel
as a horse.
While the Ottoman Empire controlled or
influenced the populated areas Bell visited, the wilderness was largely
uncharted. Bell wandered throughout the
desert, befriended the Bedouin sheikhs who controlled the wilderness and made
copious notes about tribal alliances as the Bedouin chiefs defended their trade
routes, grazing grounds, and wells from their neighbors and rivals. Many tribesmen were totally ruthless even to
other family members, but Bell spoke their language, she understood the rules
of hospitality in the desert, and she was insatiably curious. Using her knowledge of cartography, she mapped
previously unknown parts of this territory.
She entered dangerous places as
if there were no question that she had a right to be there.
Her vast knowledge of the Middle East
would make her one of the people responsible for the establishment of nations,
especially Iraq, after WW I. She saw
this as a way to promote Arab autonomy. Having rebelled against the Ottoman Empire,
the Arabs did not want to substitute Western control for that of the Turks. However, the old tribal and religious animosities,
plus the discovery of oil in the Middle East, have led to continued problems that
have not been resolved to this day.
While Gertrude Bell loved Iraq, the
weather and her heavy smoking eventually took its toll on her health. She died in Baghdad in 1926 at the age of
58.
Howell’s book contains a helpful chronology
of Bell’s life and the events surrounding her life. The back of the book contains notes linked to
pages in the book, but there are no numbers in the text to interrupt one’s
reading. A lengthy bibliography is also
provided. In the front of the book are
maps of Bell’s six desert journeys that show her destinations and routes.
In addition to shining a light on a
fascinating and gifted woman, Howell’s book also helped me put into context
current events in the Middle East. A
movie starring Nicole Kidman, titled Queen
of the Desert, was released in 2015 but it didn’t fare well with critics or
at the box office.
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| www.bbc.com |
