Desert Queen -

Janet Wallach

Anchor Books

1999

425 páginas

14h 10m

ISBN-10: 1400096197

When members of London's Royal Geographical Society gathered on the evening of April 4, 1927 -- less than a year after her death -- to pay her tribute, everyone seemed to agree that Gertrude Bell had been "the most powerful woman in the British Empire in the years after World War I."
Born July 14, 1868, the cherished and brilliant daughter of the brilliant and admired Hugh Bell, Gertrude Bell grew up surrounded by the highest examples of "morality, self-discipline and hard work." Despite this fairy-tale environment, adversity tempered her character. At the age of three she had lost her mother; at 25 she had lost her fiance, Henry Cadogan. In January 1900, after five years of restless wandering, she arrived in Jerusalem to study Arabic, "her goal to enter the Arab world."

For the rest of her life, Gertrude Bell's destiny and fortunes would be linked with the Middle East. Although her personal life shriveled into spinsterhood and her professional life proved to be a lonely path, the Arabs made her one of their own. She became a famous author, an acknowledged archaeologist, a daring traveler dressed in extravagant clothes who penetrated dangerous regions of the Arabian desert.

During World War I, the Victorian adventurer became the only woman to earn the grade of Political Officer -- and after the Great War, the only woman to be named to the post of Oriental Secretary. Her experiences -- among them, six long desert treks -- made her a formidable expert, more knowledgeable about the personalities and politics of the Arabs in Northern and Central Arabia than anyone else.

The Cairo Conference of 1921 underscored the importance of Gertrude Bell's contributions to, and influence on, the political and economical status of the post-World War I Middle East. As Janet Wallach comments: "The meeting had gone almost exactly according to Gertrude's plan. It was she who had set her sights on Faisal as King of the new Arab state [of Iraq]; it was she who had fought to include the vilayhets of Basrah, Baghdad and Mosul, and to embrace Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds; it was she who had decided the borders and drawn the lines in the sand around Iraq. All that she had envisioned was beginning to take shape." As if to confirm that vision, King Faisal himself had told her, with a kind of loving respect, "You're an Iraqui. You're a Bedouin."

But that high water mark was also the turning point in Gertrude Bell's life. As the new Arab state took on its own momentum, her influence and importance became less. In early summer of 1926, she wrote, "One has the sharp sense of being near the end of things with no certainty as to what, if anything, one will do next. . . . It is a very lonely business living here now."

On Sunday, July 11, 1926, three days before her 58th birthday, Gertrude Bell took an extra dose of the sleeping pills on her nightstand, turned out the light, and fell into a deep sleep from which she never awoke.

Gertrude Bell first came to Janet Wallach's attention more than 20 years ago, when Wallach was about to make her first visit to the Middle East. The intrepid Victorian woman's accounts of "journeying alone in the early 1900s, surrounded only by Arab men, speaking almost no English, sleeping in tents, riding camel or horse through dangerous regions, risking robbery and even death," Wallach writes, aroused her curiosity and won her admiration.

During the Gulf War in 1991, when references to Gertrude Bell began appearing in newspapers, books, and periodicals, she seemed an ideal subject for a biography. "Little did I know," Wallach confesses, "just how marvelous a subject she would be." Marvelous, indeed! Desert Queen is more than just a fascinating portrait of an extraordinary person: it is also a thoughtful and intriguing study of how the past -- particularly in the Middle East -- continues to intrude upon the present. Desert Queen should be required reading, this political season, for anyone wishing information about and insight into the troubled and troublesome relationships between East and West.