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BEZIQUE: The Private Life of Gertrude Lowthian Bell: Part 2 Shine Comforts from The East
PART 2 of our biographical journey follows Gertrude to Oxford and an academic family home, Lady Margaret Hall, where the seventeen year old first arrived in May 1886.
Not an Oxford University college as such, we read how she nevertheless enthusiastically grasped this higher education opportunity and amazed the sisterhood of students with her sharp intellect, studious application and charismatic certainty. A ‘free-thinker’ who already carried an ‘excessively insubordinate’ label she burst in on this staid world and was both intimidating and endearing to the older, middling class of women and earnest daughters of the clergy who were her contemporaries.
Excavated to a depth of intimacy never before reached, the reader experiences the everyday life of these aspiring women and to their surprising encounters with such people as voyeuristic John Ruskin and logic lecturer Charles Dodgson (‘Lewis Carroll’), still hankering after his young female child-friends…
Out and about in the real world with her First Class qualification behind her, and with an ever-curious mind and thirst for knowledge, Gertrude eagerly grasps all the travel opportunities presented to her.
We read - and published here for the first time - her earliest piece of travel writing and closely follow her on a journey that would permanently alter the course of her life (and the lives of others). As in Bezique, the card game she played when en route to exotic Tehran, she had to decide what to discard and what to hold onto with a view to winning the game – winning future happiness. The skill of the game lies in judging what to hold in one’s hand for future play, what to declare as achieved, and what to discard. The predominance of court cards means that there is an overabundance of riches. Well, destiny had dealt her a fabulous hand – too good in many ways. She held all the best cards: intelligence, wealth, privilege, status and was an Englishwoman at the apogee of the British Empire. Along the way she discarded the Muse of lyric poetry and the sisterhood of women, benevolent charity, and ambition in politics and academia. She dutifully chose to hold close her father and stepmother (especially her father); she chose to hold tight to history, literature and art, and, later, archaeology; and, again later, again dutifully, she never dropped her complete, sometimes blind, loyalty to the British state and its overseas interests.
The months in exotic Persia were her own ‘eager days’ and her new found love in that delicious spring of 1892 was ‘an unusual type of Englishman’, Henry Cadogan. But the cards fall badly; Gertrude returns to England and a veil of silence descends over the affair. She is staying at her Cumbrian ancestral homeland near Penrith when she hears of tragedy in paradise.
Not an Oxford University college as such, we read how she nevertheless enthusiastically grasped this higher education opportunity and amazed the sisterhood of students with her sharp intellect, studious application and charismatic certainty. A ‘free-thinker’ who already carried an ‘excessively insubordinate’ label she burst in on this staid world and was both intimidating and endearing to the older, middling class of women and earnest daughters of the clergy who were her contemporaries.
Excavated to a depth of intimacy never before reached, the reader experiences the everyday life of these aspiring women and to their surprising encounters with such people as voyeuristic John Ruskin and logic lecturer Charles Dodgson (‘Lewis Carroll’), still hankering after his young female child-friends…
Out and about in the real world with her First Class qualification behind her, and with an ever-curious mind and thirst for knowledge, Gertrude eagerly grasps all the travel opportunities presented to her.
We read - and published here for the first time - her earliest piece of travel writing and closely follow her on a journey that would permanently alter the course of her life (and the lives of others). As in Bezique, the card game she played when en route to exotic Tehran, she had to decide what to discard and what to hold onto with a view to winning the game – winning future happiness. The skill of the game lies in judging what to hold in one’s hand for future play, what to declare as achieved, and what to discard. The predominance of court cards means that there is an overabundance of riches. Well, destiny had dealt her a fabulous hand – too good in many ways. She held all the best cards: intelligence, wealth, privilege, status and was an Englishwoman at the apogee of the British Empire. Along the way she discarded the Muse of lyric poetry and the sisterhood of women, benevolent charity, and ambition in politics and academia. She dutifully chose to hold close her father and stepmother (especially her father); she chose to hold tight to history, literature and art, and, later, archaeology; and, again later, again dutifully, she never dropped her complete, sometimes blind, loyalty to the British state and its overseas interests.
The months in exotic Persia were her own ‘eager days’ and her new found love in that delicious spring of 1892 was ‘an unusual type of Englishman’, Henry Cadogan. But the cards fall badly; Gertrude returns to England and a veil of silence descends over the affair. She is staying at her Cumbrian ancestral homeland near Penrith when she hears of tragedy in paradise.
167 pages, Kindle Edition
Published June 9, 2018
3 people want to read
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