Freya Stark

Cover of Jane Fletcher Geniesse's biography of Freya Stark

Dame Freya Madeline Stark, Mrs. Perowne, DBE (born 31 January 1893, Paris, France — died 9 May 1993, Asolo, Italy) was a British explorer and travel writer. She wrote more than two dozen books on her travels in the Middle East and Afghanistan, as well as several autobiographic works and essays. She was one of the first outsiders to travel through the Arabian deserts.

Early life and studies

Freya Madeline Stark was born on 31 January 1893 in Paris, where her parents were studying art. Her mother, Flora, was an Italian of Polish/German descent; her father, Robert, an English painter from Devon. Stark spent much of her childhood in north Italy, helped by the fact that Pen Browning, a friend of her father, had bought three houses in Asolo. Her maternal grandmother lived in Genoa. For her 9th birthday she received a copy of the One Thousand and One Nights, and became fascinated with the Orient. She was often ill while young and confined to the house, so she found an outlet in reading. She delighted in reading French, in particular Dumas, and taught herself Latin. When she was 13 she had an accident in a factory in Italy, when her hair got caught in a machine, and she had to spend four months getting skin grafts in hospital, which left her face slightly disfigured.

During her childhood her parents separated.

She later learned Arabic and Persian, and studied history in London.

Later travels and writings

During World War I she worked as a nurse in Italy, where her mother had remained and taken a share in a business. Her sister Vera married the co-owner. In November 1927 she visited Asolo for the first time in years.

Later that month she boarded a ship for Beirut, where her travels in the East began. She stayed first at the home of James Elroy Flecker in Lebanon, and then in Baghdad, Iraq (then a British protectorate), where she met the British high commissioner.

By 1931 she had completed three dangerous treks into the wilderness of western Iran, parts of which no Westerner had ever visited, and she had located the long-fabled Valleys of the Assassins (hashish-eaters).

During the 1930s she penetrated the Hadhramaut, the hinterland of southern Arabia, where only a handful of Western explorers had previously ventured, never as far or as widely as she went.

During World War II, she joined the British Ministry of Information, and contributed to the creation of the propaganda network Ikhwan al Hurriya ('Brotherhood of Freedom') aimed at persuading Arabs to support the Allies or at least remain neutral.

In 1947, at the age of fifty-four, she married Stewart Perowne, a British administrator and historian. The couple did not have children, and separated in 1952 (but did not divorce). Stewart Perowne died in 1989.

After the War she travelled in Turkey, and wrote about the ancient Roman frontier in the Middle East. In 1970 she published an account of travel in Afghanistan.

As well as her books on travel and exploration she also wrote three collections of miscellaneous essays and four volumes of autobiography, and published an eight-volume collection of her letters.

Almost all her books were published by John Murray in London, with whom she had a successful and long-standing working relationship.

“

One can only really travel if one lets oneself go and takes what every place brings without trying to turn it into a healthy private pattern of one's own and I suppose that is the difference between travel and tourism. -Freya Stark

”

Works

• Baghdad Sketches (Baghdad, The Times Press Ltd, 1932; first London edition 1937).
• The Valleys of the Assassins and other Persian travels (London, 1934). [On Mazandaran, Iran]
• The Southern Gates of Arabia A Journey in the Hadhramaut (London, 1936).
• Seen in the Hadhramaut (London 1938).
• A Winter in Arabia (London, 1940). [On Hadhramaut]
• Letters from Syria (London, 1942).
• East is West (London, 1945). [On World War II in the Middle East]
• Perseus in the Wind (London, 1948). [Miscellaneous essays on philosophy and literature]
• Traveller's Prelude (London, 1950). [Autobiography]
• Beyond Euphrates. Autobiography 1928-1933 (London, 1951).
• The Coast of Incense: autobiography 1933-1939 (London, 1953).
• Ionia, A Quest (London, 1954).
• The Lycian Shore (London, 1956). [On Turkey]
• Alexander's Path: From Caria to Cilicia (London, 1958). [On Turkey]
• Riding to the Tigris (London, 1959). [On Turkey]
• Dust in the Lion's Paw. Autobiography 1939-1946 (London, 1961).
• Rome on the Euphrates: the story of a frontier (London, 1966).
• The Zodiac Arch (London, 1968). [Miscellaneous essays]
• Space, Time and Movement in Landscape (1969) [chiefly images of the Middle East]
• The Minaret of Djam, an excursion into Afghanistan (London, 1970).
• Turkey A Sketch of Turkish History (1971)
• Letters, ed. L. Moorehead (8 vols., 1974-1982)
• A Peak in Darien (London 1976). [Miscellaneous essays]
• The Journey's Echo: Selected Travel Writings (Ecco, 1988). ISBN 0-880-01218-8
• Over the Rim of the World: selected letters, ed. C. Moorehead (1988)

Sources and Further reading

• Stark, Freya (1950). Traveller's Prelude. London: John Murray. 
• Moorehead, Caroline (1985). Freya Stark. MIddlesex: Penguin ISBN 0-14-008108-9. 
• Jane Fletcher Geniesse, Passionate Nomad: The Life of Freya Stark (New York: Random House, 2001).
• Peter H. Hansen, Stark, Dame Freya Madeline (1893–1993), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004
• M. Izzard, Freya Stark A biography (1993)
• Molly Izzard ' A Marvellous Bright Eye: Freya Stark', Cornucopia Issue 2, 1992

External links

• Works by Freya Stark at Internet Archive (scanned books original editions)
• The Great Ones - Freya Stark, History's Greatest Explorers on iExplore.com. Retrieved 2009-08-25
• Arabian Phoenix
• Archival material relating to Freya Stark listed at the UK National Register of Archives