1581 Gertrude Bell, the Desert Queen

The selection for Book Club tonight is Desert Queen by Janet Wallach. This biography of Gertrude Bell, an English woman born in the 1860s is very interesting on several levels--her personal struggles as a multi-talented women who longed to be a wife and mother but was instead an advisor to Kings, her need for excitement and adventure to hold back depression and desire which took her on breath taking trips and explorations, and the feeling of today's front page news since she literally designed modern day Iraq after the end of WWI.



Unfortunately, I didn't find Wallach a particularly fascinating writer--certainly she didn't have the skill of Ron Chernow who wrote last month's selection, Alexander Hamilton. I did come across an erie quote by Winston Churchill (as Colonial Secretary one of the British drawing the boundaries of modern Iraq) in my side reading (may also be in the book).

June 14, 1921: it was Britain's intention to ". . . reduce our commitments and extricate ourselves from our burdens while at the same time discharging our obligations and building up an effective Arab Government which would always be a friend of Britain." Sort of has a familiar ring to it, doesn't it?

I have the 11th, 12th and 13th editions of Encyclopaedia Britanica, the last of which was published in 1926. So I looked up the Iraq article to see if Gertrude Bell was mentioned, but she wasn't. It was current through Spring 1926. Then I noticed the initials of the author of the article--and she had written it! Because she committeed suicide in July 1926, the article for Britannica must of been one of the last of her many publications.