A portrait in her own words of the female Lawrence of Arabia, the subject of the PBS documentary Letters from Baghdad, voiced by Tilda Swinton, and the major motion picture Queen of the Desert, starring Nicole Kidman, James Franco, Damian Lewis, and Robert Pattinson and directed by Werner Herzog Gertrude Bell was leaning in 100 years before Sheryl Sandberg. One of the great woman adventurers of the twentieth century, she turned her back on Victorian society to study at Oxford and travel the world, and became the chief architect of British policy in the Middle East after World War I. 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. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,800 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

A Woman in Arabia: The Writings of the Queen of the Desert (Penguin Classics)

Biographies & Memoirs

Bell, Gertrude

Arts & Literature

Penguin Classics

Born to transcend the social constraints of Victorian England, Gertrude Bell left the comforts of her privileged life for the unconventional — but thrilling — world of the Middle East. One of the first women to graduate from Oxford, she traveled to Persia and became passionately drawn to the Arab people, the language, and their architecture. A skilled archeologist, historian, and linguist, Bell traveled the world and wrote compelling, perceptive accounts of her daring journeys. The Desert and the Sown is considered to be one of her masterpieces. A magnificent account of personal discovery and political history, this intriguing narrative traces Bell's 1905 sojourn through Lebanon, Syria, and Palestine. With an eye for vivid detail, "the female Lawrence of Arabia" offers intriguing images from her often dangerous "wild travel" through regions never seen by another foreign woman. One hundred sixty extraordinary photos illustrate camel caravans; ruins of castles and monasteries; local markets and bazaars; Damascus with its gardens, domes, and minarets; and more. But it's Bell's impressions and conversations with contacts and confidantes of varied cultures that will hold you captive. An inspiring portrait of a woman who overcame the barriers of her generation, as well as a piece of history that offers insight into current events in the Middle East, The Desert and the Sown is fascinating reading for travelers, explorers, and citizens of the world. The book also served as the basis for the 2016 Werner Herzog film Queen of the Desert, starring Nicole Kidman, James Franco, and Robert Pattinson. Map included.

The Desert and the Sown: Travels in Palestine and Syria

Travel

Travel Writing

Dover Publications

A seeming contradiction, Gertrude Bell was both a proper Victorian and an intrepid explorer of the Arabian wilderness. She was a close friend of T. E. Lawrence, and played an important role in creating the modern map of the Middle East after World War I. The Desert and the Sown is a chronicle, illustrated by over 160 photos, of Bell's 1905 journey from Jericho to Antioch, a land of warring tribes under Turkish control.

The Desert and the Sown: The Syrian Adventures of the Female Lawrence of Arabia

Historical

Cooper Square Press

Where runs the river

Independence Press

Admired by Goethe among many others, the poetry of Hafiz appeals on its overt level to the ordinary man and woman, while containing those ingredients which enable the soul to perceive itself. These poems are culled from his masterpiece, The Diwan .

Teachings of Hafiz: Selections from the Diwan

SHAH, IDRIES

Ḥāfiẓ

Religion & Spirituality

Ishk Book Service

The Tur 'Abdin is a mountainous region in the south-east of modern Turkey, and is architecturally one of the most interesting areas for the study of early Christian architecture. In two journeys into the Tur 'Abdin early in this century, Gertrude Bell examined the more important monastic sites. Her two reports on these journeys, published in 1910 and 1913, made available for the first time a full study of the Christian architecture of the region, and her photographs are particularly valuable since many of the churches have since been destroyed or suffered considerable damage. In the present volume these two seminal studies are reprinted, with the addition of over a hundred and twenty previously unpublished photographs of these monuments from the Bell archive. Gertrude Bell's text is printed as originally published, but has been up-dated by Marlia Mundell Mango with extensive notes which draw attention to subsequent work. The editor has also added an extensive Catalogue of sites and monuments visited by Bell in and around the Tur 'Abdin; this provides an alphabetical gazeteer to all of the sites mentioned in Bell's text, and supplies information about other sites and monuments visited by Bell, but of which she did not publish her photographs. The entries in this sixty-page Catalogue give the relevant information from Bell's published work for each monument; a bibliography of other work on it; building dates from inscriptions and texts; changes to the monument since visited by Bell; and a short summary of publications on the monument. Marlia Mundell Mango has also added a short glossary; a list of dated monuments in the region from A.D. 200-1500; an administrative list of provinces, metropolitan bishoprics and bishoprics covering the ecclesiastical administration of the region in late antiquity; a detailed map which incorporates most of this new information; a bibliography with a survey of archaeological and historical work on the Christian monuments of northern Mesopotamia and a total of 256 of Bell's plates, of which 128 are published here for the first time.

The Churches and Monasteries of Tur'Abdin

Arts & Photography

Mango, M. Mundell

History & Criticism

Pindar Press

This book of 'Persian Pictures' is the first published work of Gertrude Bell (1868-1926), the celebrated traveller, archaeologist, Orientalist and supporter of Arab independence. She first visited Persia in 1892, when a relative by marriage was British minister there, and published her impressions in a series of essays in 1894. Her subjects range from Roman ruins to Ottoman graves to shopping in the bazaars, and from the bustling life of cities to the isolation of the desert. Having studied the Persian language in preparation for her journey, she was able to enter into the life of the country, and especially of its women, more deeply than a casual visitor, and indeed her second publication was a free-verse translation of the fourteenth-century poet Hafiz. Bell captures a sense of delight at a mysterious land still marked by the traces of many of the great civilisations of the past.

Safar Nameh: Persian Pictures: A Book of Travel (Cambridge Library Collection - Travel, Middle East and Asia Minor)

History

Middle East

Cambridge University Press

Traveller, archaeologist, mountaineer and diplomat, Gertrude Bell (1868-1926) poured her extraordinary talents into a series of adventures through Europe and the Middle East. Addressing her experiences in Persia and Syria respectively, Safar Nameh (1894) and The Desert and the Sown (1907) are both reissued in this series. The present work, first published in 1911 and among Bell's most acclaimed, describes her recent expedition to Mesopotamia. She recounts her outward journey to the Abbasid palace of Ukhaidir and her return via Baghdad and Asia Minor. Notably discussing changes in the region after the rise of the Young Turks, including their easing of restrictions throughout the declining Ottoman Empire, Bell also saw this book as 'the attempt to record the daily life, the speech of those who had inherited the empty ground where empires had risen and expired'. Replete with photographs, it vividly opens up Middle Eastern history and archaeology.

Amurath to Amurath (Cambridge Library Collection - Travel, Middle East and Asia Minor)

In May 1892, after leaving Oxford, Bell travelled to Persia to visit her uncle, Sir Frank Lascelles, who was British minister at Tehran. In this book, published in 1894, she describes the journey she made.

Safar Nameh, Persian Pictures

Echo Library

Gertrude Margaret Lowthian Bell, CBE (14 July 1868 – 12 July 1926) was an English writer, traveller, political officer, administrator, archaeologist and spy who explored, mapped, and became highly influential to British imperial policy-making due to her skill and contacts, built up through extensive travels in Greater Syria, Mesopotamia, Asia Minor, and Arabia. Along with T. E. Lawrence, Bell helped establish the Hashemite dynasties in what is today Jordan as well as in Iraq. She played a major role in establishing and helping administer the modern state of Iraq, utilising her unique perspective from her travels and relations with tribal leaders throughout the Middle East. During her lifetime she was highly esteemed and trusted by British officials and given an immense amount of power for a woman at the time. She has been described as "one of the few representatives of His Majesty's Government remembered by the Arabs with anything resembling affection".

Gertrude Bell letters, Volume I

CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform

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Books by Bell, Gertrude