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Desert Queen: The Extraordinary Life of Gertrude Bell: Adventurer, Adviser to Kings, Ally of Lawrence of Arabia. By JANET WALLACH. New York: Nan A. Talese, 1996, 419 pp. $27.50. ISBN 0 385 47408 3
This is the biography of Britain's first female political officer and her role in drawing the national boundaries of the modern Middle East. Gertrude Bell, born in 1868, was also the first woman to receive a First in Modern History at Oxford: yet, finding her energy and intellect circumscribed by social conventions at home, she sought adventure abroad. Her First trip to the Middle East, in 1899 1900, was momentous, beginning with her study of Arabic in Jerusalem, and concluding with a trip through Druze territory to Damascus, which the Turkish authorities had...