‘I glimpse her ahead of me’ – a solo female traveller follows her hero across Turkey

Green-eyed Gertrude Bell belongs in Charles Doughty’s Travels in Arabia Deserta, that slab of velvety antique that enthralled the English (they were not yet British) in the love-affair phase of their relationship with the Arabs. County Durham-born to a wealthy industrialist father, Bell (1868-1926) was a key player when the Powers tried ineptly to mould the Middle East, as the Ottoman Empire crumbled. She is well covered in the literature and appears in a large hat alongside Churchill in conference photographs. But as Pat Yale announces in this new book: ‘Her time in Turkey has been largely overlooked.’

Bell travelled extensively in that country before the first world war (starting in 1899) and in its aftermath. She wrote two books about it, The Thousand and One Churches and The Churches and Monasteries of the Tur Abdin, as well as another three in which it featured, plus diaries, voluminous letters and articles in the Revue Archéologique.