The British Mandate of Iraq had problems from its beginnings.

Does she deserve this attention? Was she typical of her colleagues? What are the terms by which we can assess a policymaker eighty years after her death? More than ten biographies have portrayed her as the ideal Arabist, political analyst, and administrator. When I served as a British official in southern Iraq in 2003, I often heard Iraqis compare my female colleagues to “Gertrude Bell.” It was generally casual flattery and yet the example of Bell and her colleagues was unsettling. This country, created in 1920 from the three Ottoman provinces of Baghdad, Basra, and Mosul, which were conquered and occupied by the British during World War I, was given the status of a British mandate and called Iraq. Yet from 1916 to 1926, Gertrude Bell won the affection of Arab statesmen and the admiration of her superiors, founded a national museum, developed a deep knowledge of personalities and politics in the Middle East, and helped to design the constitution, select the leadership, and draw the borders of a new state. She was a wealthy Oxford-educated amateur with no academic training in international affairs and no experience of government, policy, or management. Too long eclipsed by Lawrence, Gertrude Bell emerges at last in her own right as a vital player on the stage of modern history, and as a woman whose life was both a heartbreaking story and a grand adventure.When the British needed a senior political officer in Basra during World War I, they appointed a forty-six-year-old woman who, apart from a few months as a Red Cross volunteer in France, had never been employed. In this masterful biography, Janet Wallach shows us the woman behind these achievements–a woman whose passion and defiant independence were at odds with the confined and custom-bound England she left behind. After the war, she played a major role in creating the modern Middle East and was, at the time, considered the most powerful woman in the British Empire. Recruited by British intelligence during World War I, she played a crucial role in obtaining the loyalty of Arab leaders, and her connections and information provided the brains to match T. Here is the story of Gertrude Bell, who explored, mapped, and excavated the Arab world throughout the early twentieth century.

This “richly textured biography” ( Chicago Tribune) inspired the mesmerizing documentary, Letters from Baghdad, soon to air on public television.

Desert queen by janet wallach