Safar Nameh - Persian Pictures - A Book Of Travel (1894; 1928; Cambridge UP, 2011)

When Gertrude Bell's uncle was appointed Minister in Tehran in 1891, she declared that the great ambition of her life was to visit Persia. Several months later, she did. And so began a lifetime of travel and a lifelong enchantment with what she saw as the romance of the East, which evolved into a deep understanding of its cultures and people. This vivid and impressionistic series of sketches, her first foray into writing, is an evocative meditation that moves between Persia's heroic past and its long decline; the public face of Tehran and the otherworldly 'secret, mysterious life of the East', the lives of its women, its lush, enclosed gardens; from the bustling cities to the lonely wastelands of Khorasan.Gertrude Lowthian Bell, daughter of Sir Hugh Bell and granddaughter of Sir Lowthian Bell, Bt., was born at her grandfather’s residence in Durham on 14th July 1868. In 1885, Gertrude went up to Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, and two years later took a brilliant First in History. In 1891, her uncle SirFrank Lascelles being appointed British Minister in Teheran, she began to learn Persian; and when in the following spring she accompanied Lady Lascelles to Persia, she had the great advantage of being able to speak and read the language of that country. She recorded her experiences and impressions during that visit in her diary, with no thought of giving them to the world; but Mr Bentley, the publisher, was anxious to have them, and her family seconded the proposal, so that she eventually consented, with much diffidence, to publication, stipulating, however, that her name should not appear. So in 1894 the sketches came out as Safar Nameh. Persian Pictures. A Book of Travel. The book was well received at the time, but then forgotten; it was not reprinted until 1928, when Messrs Ernest Benn published it with its shorter title, Persian Pictures, and with a preface by the late Sir Denison Ross. This book of 'Persian Pictures' is the first published work of Gertrude Bell (1868–1926), the celebrated traveller, archaeologist, Orientalist and supporter of Arab independence. She first visited Persia in 1892, when a relative by marriage was British minister there, and published her impressions in a series of essays in 1894. Her subjects range from Roman ruins to Ottoman graves to shopping in the bazaars, and from the bustling life of cities to the isolation of the desert. Having studied the Persian language in preparation for her journey, she was able to enter into the life of the country, and especially of its women, more deeply than a casual visitor, and indeed her second publication was a free-verse translation of the fourteenth-century poet Hafiz. Bell captures a sense of delight at a mysterious land still marked by the traces of many of the great civilisations of the past. This book of 'Persian Pictures' is the first published work of Gertrude Bell (1868-1926), the celebrated traveller, archaeologist, and Orientalist. These essays from 1894 capture a sense of delight at a mysterious land still marked by the traces of many of the great civilisations of the past.