An Englishwoman who died in 1926 risked her life over and over to travel the globe, eventually settling in Persia and playing a major role in creating the nation now known as Iraq.
If Hollywood producers had made a different decision 50 years ago, they could have filmed “Gertrude of Arabia” rather than “Lawrence of Arabia.” Then Englishwoman adventurer Gertrude Bell (1868-1926) would have become a household name, rather than Englishman adventurer T.E. Lawrence (1888-1935), who lagged years behind.
Hollywood’s adaptation of Lawrence’s book, “The Seven Pillars of Wisdom,” generated a swashbuckling cinematic saga – “Lawrence of Araabia” – that is more or less true. Actor Peter O’Toole, portraying Lawrence, became an instant star.
It is not too late for a “Gertrude of Arabia” companion Hollywood blockbuster, and such a movie would be filled with relevance for viewers in 2007 – because of Iraq, and because of feminism.
Biographer Georgina Howell, a British journalist, tells the Bell story masterfully. Although an unabashed admirer of Bell for many years, Howell avoids hagiography through extensive research into Bell’s flaws as well as her considerable virtues. Although crammed with names of people and places quite likely unknown to most readers in 2007, the biography never bogs down in detail.
Born to a wealthy commercial family, Bell enjoyed plenty of advantages. But in a stratified society that pigeonholed women as wives and mothers, Bell had no reason to expect anything different. Fortunately for Bell, her father, Hugh, believed in the education of women. Furthermore, after Bell’s mother died in childbirth when Gertrude was 3 years old, a stepmother named Florence also became an enabler of education and exploration.
Having finished her higher education, Bell followed the debutante path expected of her, coming out into society at a London gala. She enjoyed the company of well-bred men, but felt uncertain about marriage and motherhood. While trying to decide whether to break inexorably with convention, Bell traveled to present-day Romania to visit relatives of her stepmother. She found it heady to learn new customs and a new language.
Throughout the book, Howell takes readers inside Bell’s mind, but never gratuitously. After Bell returns from Romania, Howell moves subtly through a stretch of her subject’s indecisiveness, allowing thoughts to replace actions.
The indecision evaporated when Bell’s aunt invited her to travel to Persia and Gertrude said yes. She studied the language, learned local customs in places like Teheran, and became captivated. Yet not even Bell could have predicted that when she returned to Persia during World War I, she would arrive as an ambassador without portfolio. Through the vast knowledge she had gained, the force of her personality and her sincere hope that Arabs could rule themselves as skillfully as the British, Bell played a significant role in Baghdad. Howell aptly titles one of the biography’s chapters “Government Through Gertrude.”
Any thinking person today understands that women are as capable, or as craven, as men in a number of measures. In Bell’s era, however, hardly anybody accepted such a notion. That Bell could travel through unforgiving desert and other rough terrain without becoming lost or injured or dehydrated or raped or murdered seems miraculous. Howell explains the nature of that secular miracle in clear prose filled with telling details.
If any biography proves the adage that truth is stranger than fiction, this is that biography.
Steve Weinberg is a biographer in Columbia, Mo.
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NONFICTION
Gertrude Bell
Queen of the Desert, Shaper of Nations
Georgina Howell
$27.50
