Dame Freya Madeline Stark, Mrs. Perowne, DBE

Order of the British Empire

The Most Excellent Order of the British Empire is an order of chivalry established on 4 June 1917 by George V of the United Kingdom. The Order comprises five classes in civil and military divisions...

 (born 31 January 1893, Paris, France — died 9 May 1993, Asolo

Asolo

Asolo is a town and comune in the Veneto Region of Northern Italy. It is known as "The Pearl of the province of Treviso", and also as "The City of a Hundred Horizons" for its mountain settings.-History:...

, Italy

Italy

Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...

) was a British

United Kingdom

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...

 explorer and travel writer. She wrote more than two dozen books on her travels, which were mainly in Arabia, Iran and Afghanistan.

Life

Freya Madeline Stark was born in Paris, where her parents were studying art. Her mother, Flora, was an Italian of Polish/German descent; her father, Robert, an English painter from Devon.

In her lifetime Stark was famous for her experiences in the Middle East

Middle East

The Middle East is a region that encompasses Western Asia and Northern Africa. It is often used as a synonym for Near East, in opposition to Far East...

, her writing and her cartography

Cartography

Cartography is the study and practice of making maps. Combining science, aesthetics, and technique, cartography builds on the premise that reality can be modeled in ways that communicate spatial information effectively.The fundamental problems of traditional cartography are to:*Set the map's...

. She was one of the first Western

Western world

The Western world, also known as the West and the Occident , is a term referring to the countries of Western Europe , the countries of the Americas, as well all countries of Northern and Central Europe, Australia and New Zealand...

 women to travel through the Arabian desert

Arabian Desert

The Arabian Desert is a vast desert wilderness stretching from Yemen to the Persian Gulf and Oman to Jordan and Iraq. It occupies most of the Arabian Peninsula, with an area of...

s (Hadhramaut

Hadhramaut

Hadhramaut, Hadhramout, Hadramawt or Ḥaḍramūt is the formerly independent Qu'aiti state and sultanate encompassing a historical region of the south Arabian Peninsula along the Gulf of Aden in the Arabian Sea, extending eastwards from Yemen to the borders of the Dhofar region of Oman...

), often traveling solo into areas where few Europeans, let alone women, had ever been.

Stark spent much of her childhood in North Italy, helped by the fact that Pen Browning

Robert Barrett Browning

Robert Wiedeman Barrett Browning, known as Pen Browning, was an English painter. His career was moderately successful, but he is better known as the son and heir of the celebrated English poets, Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barret Browning, of whose manuscripts and memorabilia he built up a...

, a friend of her father, had bought three houses in Asolo. Her maternal grandmother lived in Genoa

Genoa

Genoa |Ligurian]] Zena ; Latin and, archaically, English Genua) is a city and an important seaport in northern Italy, the capital of the Province of Genoa and of the region of Liguria....

. For her 9th birthday she received a copy of the One Thousand and One Nights, and became fascinated with the Orient. She was often ill while young and confined to the house, so she found an outlet in reading. She delighted in reading French, in particular Dumas

Alexandre Dumas, père

Alexandre Dumas, , born Dumas Davy de la Pailleterie was a French writer, best known for his historical novels of high adventure which have made him one of the most widely read French authors in the world...

, and taught herself Latin. When she was 13 she had an accident in a factory in Italy, when her hair got caught in a machine, and she had to spend four months getting skin grafts in hospital, which left her face slightly disfigured.

She later learned Arabic

Arabic language

Arabic is a name applied to the descendants of the Classical Arabic language of the 6th century AD, used most prominently in the Quran, the Islamic Holy Book...

 and Persian

Persian language

Persian is an Iranian language within the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European languages. It is primarily spoken in Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan and countries which historically came under Persian influence...

, studied history in London and during World War I worked as a nurse in Italy, where her mother had remained and taken a share in a business. Her sister Vera married the co-owner. In November 1927 she visited Asolo for the first time in years, and later that month boarded a ship for Beirut, where her travels in the East began. She based herself first at the home of James Elroy Flecker

James Elroy Flecker

James Elroy Flecker was an English poet, novelist and playwright. As a poet he was most influenced by the Parnassian poets.-Biography:...

 in Lebanon and then in Baghdad, where she met the British high commissioner

High Commissioner (Commonwealth)

In the Commonwealth of Nations, a High Commissioner is the senior diplomat in charge of the diplomatic mission of one Commonwealth government to another.-History:...

.

By 1931 she had completed three dangerous treks into the wilderness of western Iran, parts of which no Westerner had ever visited, and she had located the long-fabled Valleys of the Assassins (hashish-eaters

Hashshashin

The Assassins were an order of Nizari Ismailis, particularly those of Persia that existed from around 1092 to 1265...

). During the 1930s she penetrated the hinterland of southern Arabia, where only a handful of Western explorers had previously ventured, never as far or as widely as she went.

During World War II

World War II

World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...

, she joined the British Ministry of Information and contributed to the creation of the propaganda

Propaganda

Propaganda is a form of communication that is aimed at influencing the attitude of a community toward some cause or position so as to benefit oneself or one's group....

 network Ikhwan al Hurriya ('Brotherhood of Freedom') aimed at persuading Arabs to support the Allies or at least remain neutral.

Almost all her books were published by John Murray

John Murray (publisher)

John Murray is an English publisher, renowned for the authors it has published in its history, including Jane Austen, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Lord Byron, Charles Lyell, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Herman Melville, and Charles Darwin...

 in London, with whom she had a successful and long-standing working relationship.

Works

• Baghdad Sketches (Baghdad, The Times Press Ltd, 1932; first London, John Murray edition 1937).
• The Valleys of the Assassins (London, 1934).
• The Southern Gates of Arabia (London, 1936).
• Seen in the Hadhramaut (London 1938).
• A Winter in Arabia (London, 1940).
• Letters from Syria (London, 1943).
• East is West (London, 1945).
• Perseus in the Wind (London, 1948).
• Traveller's Prelude (London, 1950).
• Beyond Euphrates. Autobiography 1928-1933 (London, 1951).
• The Coast of Incense (London, 1953).
• Ionia, A Quest (London, 1954).
• The Lycian Shore (London, 1956).
• Alexander's Path: From Caria to Cilicia (London, 1958).
• Riding to the Tigris (London, 1959).
• Dust in the Lion's Paw. Autobiography 1939-46 (London, 1961).
• Rome on the Euphrates (London, 1966).
• The Zodiac Arch (London, 1968).
• The Minaret of Djam, an excursion in Afghanistan (London, 1970).
• A Peak in Darien (London 1976).
• The Journey's Echo: Selected Travel Writings (Ecco, 1988). ISBN 0-880-01218-8

Sources

• Jane Fletcher Geniesse, Passionate Nomad: The Life of Freya Stark (New York: Random House, 2001).
• Peter H. Hansen, Stark, Dame Freya Madeline (1893–1993), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004
• Molly Izzard ' A Marvellous Bright Eye: Freya Stark', Cornucopia
  Cornucopia (magazine)
  Cornucopia is a magazine about Turkish culture, art and history, published jointly in the United Kingdom and Turkey.-Content:Cornucopia was founded by John Scott and Berrin Torolsan in 1992. It is an English Language magazine that concerns Turkish culture...
  
   Issue 2, 1992

External links

• Works by Freya Stark at Internet Archive
  Internet Archive
  The Internet Archive is a non-profit digital library with the stated mission of "universal access to all knowledge". It offers permanent storage and access to collections of digitized materials, including websites, music, moving images, and nearly 3 million public domain books. The Internet Archive...
  
  (scanned books original editions)
• The Great Ones - Freya Stark, History's Greatest Explorers on iExplore.com. Retrieved 2009-08-25
• Arabian Phoenix