Jane Fletcher Geniesse: Freya Stark: Passionate Nomad

By DAVID HILL

When Freya Stark was 12, a machinery belt tore half the skin and hair from her head. Primitive 1910s surgery never fully repaired the damage. For the rest of her life, Stark considered herself ugly.

She was barely 1.5m and longed to be tall. Born of artistic, ambulatory parents in Paris and raised in Italy, she yearned for the reassuringly starchy and emotionally throttled English way.

So what did this textbook inferiority complex do? She put on her cloche hat and ankle-length skirt, and climbed for 12 hours up ice walls in the Alps. Then she swapped her cloche for a pith helmet, explored most of what was then Persia, Iraq and Arabia, and wrote great travel books about it.

This is the best sort of biography: it tells a story. A strong, striding story, that Geniesse writes with passion and compassion.

She doesn't spare her subject. Stark could be selfish, irresponsible, vindictive. Her editors had to beg her to delete slanderous references to colleagues and companions. She detested other travel writers: they were tourists, not travellers.

She was also brave, stoic, hugely vulnerable, sexually ardent yet ambivalent. At 54 she married a younger man who then declared himself gay. It could have been a catastrophe; it remained a friendship.

At 72, she made a mule trip through the Taurus Mountains, while her godsons held her stirrups so the storm wouldn't blow her away. At 89, she was in the Himalayas.

She lived three months past her 100th birthday, though her mind had dwindled before then.

Geniesse calls her the last of the romantic travellers. Her books such as The Southern Gates of Arabia lifted the genre into literature. She anticipated the Therouxs and Brysons of 60 years later by concentrating as much on the traveller as on the travels.

Meticulously annotated, greyly illustrated, Passionate Nomad is an admirable balance of analysis and anecdote. It makes full use of Stark's wonderfully wicked letters, revealing the complexities of a woman who insisted her Iraqi staff stand when she entered the room, yet was tenaciously opposed to British imperialism.

Geniesse describes her arriving in Lebanon for the first time with a copy of Dante, a revolver, a fur coat and hardly any money. In Damascus, she hid herself in black veils to visit a Shia mosque. She would probably have been killed if detected.

She slept by open sewers, or in the tents of local leaders who sprinkled her with rose water.

She discovered the site of Ancient Cana, and the maps she drew were invaluable to the British military. In return, she called on that military to rescue her rather a lot.

She doubted she would be murdered, but it was an energising thought. She was totally intrepid and totally oblivious.

Read this splendid book, and feel sad and relieved that you never knew her.

Pimlico

$45

* David Hill is a Taranaki writer.