Prologue

She was always surrounded by men: rich men, powerful men, diplomats, sheikhs,* lovers and mentors. To picture her you had only to envision a red-haired Victorian woman with ramrod posture, piercing green eyes, a long pointed nose and a fragile figure fashionably dressed, and, whether in London, Cairo, Baghdad or the desert, always at the center of a circle of men. So it was only natural that on the drizzly evening of April 4, 1927, less than a year after her death, those who gathered at London’s Royal Geographical Society to pay her tribute were mostly men. Resplendent in white tie and tails, beribboned medals flanking their chests, they marched through the halls recounting their explorations and hers.

“Gertrude Bell,” “Gertrude Bell,” the name flew around the room. She had been, they seemed to agree, the most powerful woman in the British Empire in the years after World War I. Hushed voices called her “the uncrowned queen of Iraq.” They whispered that she was the brains behind Lawrence of Arabia, and a few knowingly ventured that she had drawn the lines in the sand for Winston Churchill.

Some said she had been arrogant, imperious and ruthlessly ambitious, but others knew that flowers and children could melt her heart, and that what she had desperately wanted, more than anything else, was to have been a wife and mother. They had heard she was engaged to be married once, and that later there had been a painful love affair, but they wondered why she had never wed.

A handful of men acknowledged she had achieved nothing less than a miracle by creating the modern state of Iraq; many grumbled that she had given in to the whims of the Arabs, causing the British no end of trouble and expense. A few even believed that she, the exuberant Englishwoman, had fallen in love with Faisal, the melancholy Arab prince, and that she had lost her head like a schoolgirl, but none could deny her achievements: the first woman to earn a first-class degree in Modern History at Oxford; the author of seven books, scores of articles in publications that ranged from academic journals to the pages of The Times, and a White Paper considered to be a masterpiece by the British Government. She was the only woman to earn the grade of Political Officer during the Great War and the only woman after the war to be named to the high post of Oriental Secretary; the winner of the gold medal of the Royal Geographical Society; the honorary director of antiquities at the Baghdad museum; and the recipient of a Commander of the Order of the British Empire.

The members of the Royal Geographical Society reminisced about her life before the Great War: a lone Englishwoman in the male, Muslim world of the Middle East, a famous author who wrote about the Arabs, an acknowledged archaeologist, a courageous traveler who dined with china and crystal, dressed in extravagant clothes, rode on camel and horse and penetrated dangerous regions of the Arabian desert. They had heard she was a spy who went behind enemy lines to gather information for the British during World War I. They remembered the way Vita Sackville-West had described her “irrepressible vitality” and her “gift of making every one feel suddenly eager; of making you feel that life was full and rich and exciting.” And yet, on that same visit to Iraq in 1926, Vita had noticed how frail and ill her friend looked. Gertrude Bell’s life had ended tragically only a few months after that, two days shy of her fifty-eighth birthday.

At the gathering in her honor, her father addressed the distinguished group. Sir Hugh, in his eighties, affirmed the unique relationship of which so many had known. “I think,” he said, “there never were father and daughter who stood in such intimate relations as she and I did to one another.” But it was her mentor David Hogarth, President of the Royal Geographical Society, who spoke that evening about her Arabian adventure, of which “[T. E.] Lawrence, relying on her reports, made signal use in the Arab campaigns of 1917 and 1918.” That trip through the desert was only one of the many milestones that marked the journey of her life.

* For the meaning of this term and other Arabic words used in the book, please refer to the Glossary.

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