Gertrude Bell, Queen of the Desert, Shaper of Nations, by Georgina Howell (Farrar, Straus, Giroux $27.50 paperback)

Georgina Howell’s latest biography draws the portrait of “a poet, scholar, historian, mountaineer, photographer, archaeologist, gardener, cartographer, linguist and distinguished servant of the state.” Howell, a British magazine journalist, has written a definitive account of Bell’s life.

Sprung from Victorian England, Bell’s personal accomplishments inspired awe.Perhaps her most interesting accomplishment is that she is credited with drawing the first political boundaries of modern Iraq. Like the celebrated soldier-diplomat T.E. Lawrence, she was known for her razor-sharp knowledge of the deserts of Arabia.

Like most biographies, the narrative starts with Bell’s childhood. The first tragic event of her life, at age three, was the loss of her mother. As a result Bell formed a special relationship with her father Hugh that would last a lifetime. She was strong-willed and difficult as a child, and it would take her stepmother Florence’s patience and spirit to help shape and protect the Victorian values that would guide this extraordinary woman through a man’s world.

Although she was from a moneyed background, no one could claim Bell’s accomplishments were due to privilege. Her work ethic and intelligence enabled her to attend Oxford University’s first women’s college. She graduated from Oxford in two years. A master of linguistic abilities, she learned Persian, French, and Arabic.

Always an independent thinker, Bell was, surprisingly, an anti-suffragette. She found the tactics of the militant suffragettes insufferable, and believed that working women, overly swamped as they were with duties at home, would not have the time to educate themselves enough to vote responsibly. Although opposed to the woman’s right to vote, she was always a supporter of woman’s rights in the home and workplace. Later in life, she also became a champion for the rights of Muslim women.

The second tragic event of her life was the loss of her fiancé at age 27. Her grief fueled her first round of death defying exploits as a mountaineer. She tackled unheralded territory for a woman in the Swiss Alps. After climbing Klein Engelhorn, Urbachthaler Engelhorn, and Finsteraarhorn, the Matterhorn was her last great accomplishment. By the end of her career she was considered Europe’s most prominent female mountaineer.

She then turned her attention to archaeology, which would begin her lifelong love affair with the Arabian desert. “When she discovered desert travel, the challenges suddenly proliferated into an all-embracing personal experiment of which she would never reach an end. There were languages to perfect, customs to learn, new kinds of human being to plumb, archaeology and history to explore, the techniques of surveying and navigation, photography and cartography to acquire. There was the risky business of staying alive and reaching her goal; and the intoxication of asserting her own identity far from the world where she would have been recognized.”

Howell moves the narrative into what almost feels like a sidetrack after the harrowing accomplishments we read about earlier—the unconsummated love affair Bell forms with the married Dick Doughty Wylie, a “quiet war hero who had won clasps and medals in battles both during the East African campaign of 1903 and before.” Despite finally finding a man of equal intelligence and stature, a combination of his married status and Bell’s Victorian values would throw them both into a tortuous emotional love affair for the next six years. It was during this period that World War I descended on Europe and the Middle East, and the Ottoman Empire finally collapsed.

Through these passages Howell’s experience as a journalist for Vanity Fair and the American and British Vogue is apparent. The writing here has a different tone, more akin to Vogue than biography. And she is consumed with reporting details of Bell’s wardrobe that are not necessary for the story.

Howell finds her voice again when Bell goes back to Europe to help families find the status of their loved ones in combat. Then Bell is called back to the Egyptian bureau of the British Service to help establish a foothold against the Turkish southern border—there is no better person than she to gather information from various Arabian tribes.

She encouraged tribal sheiks she had met in her earlier ventures to work together against the Turks. In return she promised the British would work for a self-governing Arabia. After the war, her passionate belief in self-determination caused a great deal of conflict within her own diplomatic corps, where imperialist policies dominated.

She wrote in 1920, “The underlying truth of all criticism—and it’s what makes the critics so difficult to answer—[was] that we had promised self-governing institutions, and not only made no step towards them but were busily setting up something quite different. One of the [news]papers says, quite rightly, that we had promised an Arab government with British advisors, and had set up a British government with Arab advisers. That’s a perfectly fair statement.”

One can’t help asking what Gertrude Bell might think of the state of things in Iraq, and how she might contribute if she were alive today.

Georgina Howell’s book, though a bit flat and at times one-dimensional, is stacked with facts that make it an important read for anyone interested in the Middle East and its turbulent history.