She was brilliant, fluent in multiple languages, and extraordinarily self-confident. In an era when women didn't even travel alone to lunch, she blazed trails where few Europeans and no Victorian-era women had ever been. This detailed biography of Gertrude Bell shows what an amazing person she was. The end of Bell's life was disappointing and surprising. While I doubt I would have been friends with Bell if I had known her, I found much to admire and astonish. Here I learned a lot about Arab culture and the history of Western interference in the modern Middle East. Learning from the books I read is important to me. I found the book fascinating and truly difficult to put down. She succeeds in some areas, like politics, more than others, like romance.
Rather, Bell is described as a human with flaws who wants to be a Person, to be someone of consequence. While her story is amazing, Wallach doesn’t present her as Wonder Woman.
Ultimately, their efforts led to a newly formed country of Iraq with an Arab, Faisal I, on the throne. She worked with her friend, Lawrence of Arabia, to further the Arab voice in the region. She even earned their respect.ĭuring and after the Great War, she was a champion of self-government by Arab people. She dined with sheiks and caliphs who normally would not discourse with a woman. In a day when women were expected to be “politely educated,” married, and subservient, Bell was single, Oxford-educated, a mountain climber, and a desert explorer.Īfter teaching herself Arabic, she braved the deserts of pre-World War I Mesopotamia and Arabia with a few servants and her guns. Too long eclipsed by Lawrence, Gertrude Bell emerges at last in her own right as a vital player on the stage of modern history, and as a woman whose life was both a heartbreaking story and a grand adventure. In this masterful biography, Janet Wallach shows us the woman behind these achievements-a woman whose passion and defiant independence were at odds with the confined and custom-bound England she left behind. After the war, she played a major role in creating the modern Middle East and was, at the time, considered the most powerful woman in the British Empire.
Recruited by British intelligence during World War I, she played a crucial role in obtaining the loyalty of Arab leaders, and her connections and information provided the brains to match T. Here is the story of Gertrude Bell, who explored, mapped, and excavated the Arab world throughout the early twentieth century. This "richly textured biography" ( Chicago Tribune) inspired the mesmerizing documentary, Letters from Baghdad, soon to air on public television.
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