A Woman in Arabia : The Writings of the Queen of the Desert

A portrait in her own words of the female Lawrence of Arabia.
One of the great woman adventurers of the twentieth century and the chief architect of British policy in the Middle East after World War 1, Gertrude Bell turned her back on Victorian society to study at Oxford and travel the world. Mountaineer, archaeologist, Arabist, writer, poet, linguist, and spy, she dedicated her life to championing the Arab cause and was instrumental in drawing the borders that define today´s Middle East.
As she wrote in one of her letters, ´It´s a bore being a woman when you are in Arabia.´ Forthright and spirited, opinionated and playful, and deeply instructive about the Arab world, this volume brings together Bell´s letters, military dispatches, diary entries, and travel writings to offer an intimate look at a woman who shaped nations.
´Her letters are exactly herself-eager, interested, almost excited….She kept an everlasting freshness; or a least, however tired she was, she could always get up enough interest to match that of anyone who came to see her. I don´t think I ever met anyone more entirely civilized, in the sense of her width of intellectual sympathy.´ T. E. Lawrence