Yet when she fell in love with Henry Cadogan, her father told her he would not give her permission to marry. She was sent abroad to give her some sophistication and to prevent her from becoming a bluestocking. Although she was intellectually outstanding, from a marital point of view she was a failure, having found neither husband nor a fiancé. Like most young women of her time, Gertrude Bell was expected to marry by the age of twenty. What were Gertrude Bell’s relationships like with other females? Why did she have such disdain for the British wives in Baghdad? Were there any women she admired? Did her attitude toward women change over the years? If so, how did it manifest itself?ģ.
In her adolescent years, she always seemed at odds with her stepmother the one woman she seemed to care for was her aunt Florence, whose husband was the British ambassador to Bucharest and Tehran.
She prided herself on being better than the others around her, and as she grew up, her best friends were her brother Maurice and her cousin Billy Lascelles. Gertrude Bell was a difficult child: precocious, stubborn, and naughty enough to discourage her nannies from staying on the job. Hugh Bell’s motto was “obstacles are made to be overcome.” How did Gertrude Bell’s upbringing shape her? How did she apply her father’s philosophy to her life?Ģ. In addition to running their prosperous business, Gertrude’s father Hugh Bell and her grandfather Lowthian Bell were well-educated, intellectually curious, adventurous, and politically engaged. The Bell family lived in northern England and employed 40,000 workers in their coal and iron works. Gertrude Bell was born in 1868 at the height of the British Empire, when the British navy ruled the seas and British merchants supplied food and clothing to half the world’s population. This Reading Group Guide-consisting of an introduction, discussion questions*, suggestions for further reading, and author biography-is intended to enhance your group’s discussion of Janet Wallach’s Desert Queen, the remarkable biography of the woman who, because of her love of Arab culture, came to wield significant power in the British Empire.ġ.
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