Freya Stark, who lived to see 100, was certainly a colorful personality. Restless, curious and bent on going everywhere on her own, she was a true pioneer of women's travel and travel writing.
Freya Stark Biography
Born in Paris in 1893, Freya was the daughter of Flora, an Italian painter of Polish descent and Robert Stark, an English painter and sculptor. Often ill as a child, she found refuge in reading and became fascinated with the Orient. Freya was an accomplished speaker of Arabic and Persian, languages which were a necessity for her future travels into the deserts of western Iran where few Europeans, leave alone women, had ventured.
By 1931when she had completed three trips and discovered the fabled Valley of the Assassins, a goal she had set herself when reading history in London, she was an acknowledged adventurer, explorer, traveler and travel writer. The publisher of her more than two dozen travel books was John Murray of London where Valley of the Assassins appeared in 1934.
In 1947 she married Stewart Perowne and in 1972 she was made Dame of the British Empire. The last years of her life she spent in her big house in Asolo/Italy where she had also lived for several years during her adolescence.
Freya Stark's Independence
What makes her unique among the female travelers and travel writers of her time was Freya's strong sense of independence and of going things alone. She was by no means the first who traveled the Middle East or wrote about it, but no woman before her ventured into the deserts of western Iran, riding on a camel or a donkey, only accompanied by guides and guards.
Her only joint venture with archaeologist Gertrud Caton Thompson and geologist Elinor Gardner, financed by the Royal Geographical Society and Lord Wakefield to excavate in Wadi Hadhramaut was a complete failure. Freya, it appears, was not cut out for team work and her ill health contributed to the precipitated end of that particular enterprise.
She loved to travel under her own steam and one of her priorities was to socialize with the locals, learn about their customs and habits rather than approaching her subject from an academic view point. That's where her language skills came in very handy and what makes her travel writing so different form other travel writers'. It's the personal approach, her perception of landscapes and how they influence people, personal insights and experiences gleaned from getting close to the population and the desert which are the charcateristsics of her writing.
What's also endearing is that Freya was a very feminine adventurer. Decked out in good clothes, her life long passion, and hats, she wore high heels even at the excavation at Hureidha. She had an accident in a textile factory when she was 16. Her long hair got caught in a machine and her scalp was half torn off, making it necessary for extensive skin grafts to be carried out and leaving her face slightly disfigured. The result was a constant source of grief to her.
By all accounts, Freya had great charm and the spirit of a bukaneer which enticed her to several smuggling attempts.
Freya Stark's idiosycrasies which are reflected in her writing, make her a pioneer in a style of travel writing which goes far beyond the "where to go and what to see".
For further reading: Caroline Moorehead, Freya Stark, Lives of Modern Women, Penguin Books 1985
Inka Piegsa-Quischotte - Since two years I am a full time travel and lifestyle writer and blogger. I published several articles and blogs on ...
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