Travel literature ultimately was about the traveler" (p. O'Brien claims that the " real purpose" of travel "was a personal affirmation outside the narrow confines of one's normal life. Nor does Bell ever explain exactly why she has embarked on this journey. (In the publication information the deletion of "one map" is noted. This leads the reader to immediately confront a major deficiency of this new edition, namely the absence of a map of her route, which seems to follow no particular plan or, at least, not one that is explained. Along the way she visits Jericho ("an unromantic village of ramshackle hotels and huts" ), Salt, Madaba, Homs, Damascus, Hama, Aleppo, Baalbek, and numerous sites of antiquities, as well as countless villages and encampments en route. The starting point of the journey upon which this book is based is Jerusalem the end point is Alexandretta. From November 1915 until her death by suicide or accident in 1926, she was based in Iraq, where she initially served as intelligence liaison between Cairo and the British Expeditionary Force in Basra during the war. Eventually, this somewhat mystifyingly meandering existence led to her becoming a government official in Iraq during World War I, upon the recommendation of T.
vii), something which is borne out in the subsequent text.
Born in 1868 and educated at Oxford, the wealthy Bell traveled extensively throughout the Middle East in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, writing about her various experiences and adventures (including a temporary imprisonment in a harem in what is now Saudi Arabia on the eve of World War I), in the process becoming well-acquainted with the Arabic language, Arabic poetry, archeology, and, one might add, how to travel well in the area.Īs O'Brien notes, "she had a talent for travel-the sort of person who not only responds to fresh discoveries but speculates on their meaning" (p.
Gertrude Bell, as noted in the new introduction by Rosemary O'Brien, was an extraordinary Englishwoman who ended up being the "first and only woman administrator to be taken into the British imperial service as Oriental Secretary" (p. This re-publication of Gertrude Bell's 1907 book, originally entitled simply and economically Syria, chronicles her seemingly meandering journey through the desert and countryside of Palestine, Jordan and Syria in the winter of 1906. Published on H-Gender-MidEast (October, 2002)Ĭhronicle of a Long Journey: Gertrude Bell in Syria Reviewed by Ellen Fleischmann (Department of History, University of Dayton) The Desert and the Sown: The Syrian Adventures of the Female Lawrence of Arabia.
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