Green cloth binding with gilt title on the spine

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For conditions, please view our photographs. A nice clean rare copy from the library gathered by the famous Cambridge Don, computer scientist, food and wine connoisseur, Jack Arnold LANG.

This book, a first edition, was a personal gift of the author, to Jack’s mother. This sequel to “Traveller’s Prelude” describes the author’s journeys to the East, embarked upon in 1928. Through the medium of letters and extracts from her diary, she describes her life in Baghdad, her experiences in a harem in Damascus, journeys to Persia and a treasure hunt in Luristan. Dame Freya Stark has also written “The Coat of Incense”, “Dust in the Lion’s Paw”, “East is West” and “The Southern Gates of Arabia”. The book has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged.

The first part of Freya Starks’ autobiography covering her childhood, youthful struggles, and early travels in the East. Using her unique descriptive style and including many letters she portrays life in Baghdad, and her journeys to Persia, the borders of the Caspian, Syria and Luristan.

Review: Freya Stark (1893-1993) had this book published by Murray in 1951. It is autobiographical composed of extracts from her diaries and letters between May 1929 and November 1933, but refers back in the 1st Chapter to her first autobiographical work “Traveller’s Prelude” published a year earlier. In the second chapter we have a glimpse of her father Robert’s life in Nelson, British Columbia, in the West of Canada when she visited him late in 1928. He had separated from her mother and was living a rugged existence there, still painting but in semi-retirement. Nevertheless typically the chapter is made over to Freya’s own meditations and observations which take on a rather philosophical hue. The lion’s share of this book is of course devoted to her travels in Palestine, Syria, Iraq and Persia with an excursion to Koweit. We visit with her Amman, Baghdad, Mosul and Kirkuk before some adventures in Northern Persia and a return via Petra and Jerusalem. It is somehow reassuring to learn that Iraq, as a British Mandate, was almost as ungovernable then as it has now become ! However at that time the Kurds were the chief trouble-makers for the British.

Dame Freya Madeline Stark DBE (31 January 1893 – 9 May 1993) was a British-Italian explorer and travel writer. She wrote more than two dozen books on her travels in the Middle East and Afghanistan as well as several autobiographical works and essays. She was one of the first non-Arabs known to travel through the southern Arabian Desert in modern times. In 1947, at the age of 54, she married Stewart Perowne, a British administrator, Arabist, and historian, whom she had met while working as his assistant in Aden early in World War II. Perowne was homosexual, which Stark did not know when they first married, although most of his friends did. Their marriage had many troubles, and Stark did not adjust well to being the wife of a civil servant. The couple had no children, separated in 1952, but did not divorce. While revisiting Yemen in 1976, Stark suggested to the Secretary of the British Embassy with whom she was staying that she had never come close ‘to losing my virtue… including the nights I spent with Stewart.’ During that same trip, after decades without contact, Stark wrote to Perowne again, wishing him well. She was appointed a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) in the 1972 New Year’s Honours. She died at Asolo on 9 May 1993, a few months after her hundredth birthday.