Gertrude Bell

"In this volume of three of her notebooks, Rosemary O'Brien preserves Bell's elegant, vibrant prose and presents Bell as a brilliant tactician fearlessly confronting her own vulnerability. The fundamental themes of her life - reckless behavior, a divided self which combined brilliance of intellect with a passionate nature, a sense of history, and the fatal gift of falling in love with a married man - are all here in remarkable detail. Her journey to northern Arabia in 1914 earned Bell professional recognition from the Royal Geographical Society and solidified her reputation as a canny political analyst of Middle Eastern affairs." "In addition to Bell's own photographs, O'Brien has provided us an unprecedented first access to excerpts of the Bell/Charles H. M. Doughty-Wylie love letters, the married British army officer with whom she was in love and for whom her diaries were written."--BOOK JACKET.