Her haughtiness and self-importance hardly appealed to eligible young men, and those who dared to court her were soon dismissed. She was twenty years old, a snob, a bluestocking, a woman with an “attitude”. Unlike her two friends from home, she had no one to ask for her hand in marriage.

She was brash and immature, and in spite of her dazzling scholastic achievements Gertrude had failed the most important test of all. She took to scholarship so well she was able to talk her father into going off to study history at Oxford, one of very few women to achieve a degree there.Īfter college, the problem of her not finding a marriage partner was becoming an embarrassment:

But she chaffed under the priggish control of her French stepmother, a writer of operas, and ended up getting sent away to boarding school. Her recourse to reading led from the allure of “The Arabian Nights” to poetry, biographies and histories of other cultures. At home in a rural area of Northumbria near the family factories, she developed a love of nature, rock climbing, horse riding, and gardening. The death of her mother at age three is inferred to contribute to her lifelong intensive bond with her father as well as to self-reliance. Wallach does a masterly job at covering the influences of Bell’s upbringing on her personality and life choices without resorting to the discredited methods of psychohistory. She covers closely her personal metamorphosis from obedient Victorian daughter of an wealthy industrialist to a modern self-determined woman who qualified as what she termed a Person with a capital “P”. Lawrence during the war for helping foment and support Arab revolt against the Ottoman Turks and for her collaboration with him to get Faisal placed first on the throne of Syria and later Mesopotamia (aka Iraq).Įven without being Bell’s importance in world shaping, her story his worth experiencing in Wallach’s telling. Bell is best known for her work with T.E. Bell’s passion for the culture and peoples of the Middle East served the British Empire well for intelligence and liaison work during World War 1, and she had a major impact in setting the path toward Arab self-rule, most notably in the establishment of Iraq and Jordan under monarchies of the Hussein family. An excellent account of a fascinating woman who was both a product of her times and one who broke new ground for accomplishments in a male dominated world.

Desert queen by janet wallach