Desert Queen (6 page)

In the loneliness of her schooldays, she sought company through her letters. Her wooden pen with steel-tipped nib, a bottle of ink and paper became her constant companions. Throughout her life she would keep them by her side, and sometimes, when there was no one else, she used them to talk for hours to her family. Over the years, she wrote to her stepmother partly as duty, partly in friendship, partly as a journal of her experiences. Often her parents were apart and she wrote to them both. Her arm never tired; the words seemed to push the pen onto the paper without her body’s exerting any effort. She told everything there was to know; and later, when the British needed to know the terrain of the desert, she could tell them almost every grain of sand she had traversed, and when they asked about any man she had met, she could describe the birthmarks on his face and the warts on his character.

In spite of the separation at school, Florence kept a firm watch, scrutinizing Gertrude’s manners and supervising her social life. Gertrude was required to ask permission before visiting anyone outside Florence’s circle, and like all young, unmarried women from proper families, she was not allowed on the street without a chaperone. She found the rules for her gender terribly frustrating. Even a visit to a museum required an escort: “I wish I could go to the National, but you see there is no one to take me. If I were a boy, I should go to that incomparable place every week, but being a girl to see lovely things is denied me!”

At times she seemed perfectly willing to accept her mother’s control, and, indeed, all her life she acted with obedience toward her parents. She wished that Florence would come to London and visit and was delighted when Florence arranged for friends to invite her to tea. At their homes she met, among others, Mrs. Humphrey Ward, the well-known novelist; Mrs. Green, widow of the historian; Anne Ritchie, the daughter of William Thackeray; Richmond Ritchie, her husband and an influential diplomat; Jenny Lind, the Swedish soprano; Fanny Kemble, the actress and, later, Henry James and the poet Robert Browning.

At other times, when Florence was very critical, Gertrude dipped her pen in anger. After receiving three excoriating pages, she wrote back to tell Florence they were “quite horrid,” and announced gleefully that she had avenged herself by promptly burning them. Her mother constantly reprimanded her for spelling errors and grammatical shortcuts, and after one particularly critical letter, Gertrude complained about Florence’s “priggish” style. “Would you have me say when talking of the sovereign, ‘The Queen of England, Scotland, Ireland, Empress of India, Defender of the Faith’?” the sixteen-year-old asked. “My life is not long enough to give everything its full title.” Another time she complained, “You’ve told me all those things so often that I know them by heart.… I don’t think it’s any use your telling me over again. Generally, I think I could write out your letters before I open them and come pretty close to the original withal!” How different were her comments to her father. “You don’t scold me nearly enough,” she told him, “but I’m much sorrier when you don’t scold me than when you do.”

In her letters to Hugh, Gertrude solicited his help on freeing her from the dreaded piano lessons Florence insisted she have; she asked his advice on schoolwork, offered her views on history and sought her father’s opinions on free trade, Home Rule for the Irish, the fate of Prime Minister William Gladstone and the Liberal Party. She divided her writing between Florence’s interests in literature, fashion and the arts and Hugh’s interests in politics and world affairs. But slowly her own interests were developing in all of these areas. She wrote to Hugh that history might become her career (at least, although she did not say so, until she married), and in her last semester, at the suggestion of her teacher, she approached her father gingerly and asked permission to continue her studies at Oxford. If Hugh agreed to send her to university, it would be another radical step. Instead of a world of domesticity, she would be entering the realm of the elite and the powerful, a world ruled and peopled almost completely by men. “My only fear,” she wrote to her father, “is if I once go there you will never be able to get me away!”

C
HAPTER
T
WO

A Man’s World

G
ray stone walls enclosed the University of Oxford, barriers warding off the prosaic and welcoming the privileged to its rarefied air. An assemblage of chosen people lived within, the intellectuals and the high-born, supporting one another’s sense of superiority, reinforcing each other’s sense of distinction. Gertrude’s acceptance bolstered her already strong self-esteem. As unhappy as she had been at Queen’s College, confined to a middling female world, she had proven herself an outstanding scholar. Now, in a far more appealing atmosphere, with the Bells’ drive and determination, she would rise to the highest levels.

Since the twelfth century, clergymen, kings, prime ministers, diplomats, philosophers, scientists and academics had secluded themselves behind the Oxford walls to breathe the fresh air of thoughts and sample a feast of ideas. Each college hall, each cobbled path, echoed with the footsteps of powerful leaders and pioneer thinkers. Men like Roger Bacon argued in the thirteenth century for experimental methods of inquiry. In the sixteenth century Sir Thomas More defended the Catholic Church over the will of Henry VIII, and in the seventeenth century Oliver Cromwell, the country’s leader, served as Chancellor. There were scientists like Edmund Halley, who discovered a new comet, and, in the nineteenth century, Thomas Huxley, who brilliantly defended Darwin’s ideas of evolution. There were architects like Christopher Wren, who designed the Sheldonian Theatre and, later, artists like William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones, whose stained glass windows lit up Christ Church Cathedral; poets like Matthew Arnold, who immortalized the school’s spires; philosophers like John Ruskin, whose books could be found on the shelves of the Radcliffe reading room. From the rule of the Plantagenets until the reign of Queen Victoria, the brightest young men, but only men, had entered Oxford; in exchange for the freedom to think, they cloistered themselves in austere surroundings, clothed themselves in simple robes, and undertook a life of celibacy. But the tone of Oxford changed in 1874, when male students were allowed to marry. And it changed even more dramatically in 1879, when Miss Elizabeth Wordsworth, grandniece of the poet, became the first principal of Lady Margaret Hall, for young women. Only a few years later, in 1886, LMH would serve as home for Gertrude.

As principal of the women’s school, Miss Wordsworth felt her first priority was to see that her students married. She was convinced that God intended woman to be “Adam’s helpmate,” and to fill that role properly, she insisted, a young woman must develop the “minor graces” of “neat handwriting,” “skillful needlework,” and “the ways of opening and shutting doors.” Her girls were allowed to sit in on lectures and to have their own tutors, but the pursuit of intellectual ideas was still considered questionable, not just for women but for the country. As the contemporary philosopher Herbert Spencer put it, thinking was dangerous for females; “the overtaxing of their brains,” he declared, would lead to “the deficiency of reproductive power.” When Gertrude arrived, the halls of New College Chapel still reverberated with the recent sermon of Dean John Burgon: “Inferior to us God made you, and inferior to the end of time you will remain.” But Gertrude Bell hardly felt inferior: at eighteen, she was already sure that she was the equal of any male, and if anyone doubted her word, she had her father to back her up.

O
xford!
, she exclaimed at the top of her first letter home, in May 1886, and she reveled in being one of only a handful of girls in the company of hundreds of men. Round-faced and chubby, exuberant and ebullient, she arrived “half child, half woman,” her new friend Janet Hogarth said, “rather untidy, with vivid auburn hair, greenish eyes, a brilliant complexion, and a curiously long and pointed nose.” Notably she added, Gertrude had “a most engaging way of saying, ‘Well you know, my father says so and so’ as a final opinion on every question under discussion.”

On the first day of class, Gertrude walked hurriedly with Mary Talbot, a colleague in the History program, and their requisite but doting escort, Miss Wordsworth. Dressed in their long, loose black gowns and black laced boots, square black caps firmly planted on their heads, the young women chatted in nervous anticipation, stepping briskly across the old stone walks. Like Alices in Wonderland, they had to “fly” from the farthest outposts of Oxford, where they lived at LMH, through the grassy University Parks, to arrive in time for their History lecture in Balliol.

Climbing the stairs, they reached the alabaster hall and saw before them, perpendicular to the lecturer’s platform, rows of long, green baize tables and, seated at them, some two hundred men. No space was reserved for the two young women, however, and no one showed any inclination to make some room. Instead, they were led to the platform, where the professor presided. Sliding into their seats, the women listened intently while the tall, gaunt Mr. Lodge lectured on English History. “We felt it was a great event!” Gertrude wrote to her parents. Not even the thrill of her first class, however, nor the lecture by the well-known teacher could dull her sharp tongue; all that he said was straight out of his book, she scoffed. It “would have been said much better if he had read us the first few chapters.”

It was a strange segregation of females and males, as though the women’s very presence would poison the atmosphere. But to Gertrude the separate table on the platform added to the awesome prestige of being privy to an Oxford lecture. And when Mr. Bright, who taught History, had them sit in the room with their backs to him, it made her laugh. The problem was his, she believed. Certainly she did not mind sitting “cheek by jowl” with a roomful of men.

S
he enjoyed the routine of lectures in the morning, lunch at LMH, reading at the Radcliffe library and private tutorials on Saturdays. Together with Mary Talbot, she penetrated the male-filled halls of the Bodleian and hunted out books under the glaring eyes of the librarian. After receiving the requested books, she wrote her parents, they felt they “really
were
members of the University.” Earlier, when she had first arrived and did not yet have her student pass, she had been rebuffed at the Radcliffe reading room. It had come as a shock to the young woman who got almost everything she wanted. But now she was comfortably secure. The tall, dark-eyed Mary Talbot, a niece of Prime Minister William Gladstone, soon became Gertrude’s closest comrade. Edith Langridge, who lived in the room next door and was an earlier graduate of Queen’s College, looked after her. Janet Hogarth, whose older brother David was an Oxford scholar and an archaeologist doing work in the East, would also become a lifelong friend.

She appreciated the care of the “very nice” Miss Wordsworth, although it must be noted that the principal thought Gertrude was not a woman one could count on. “Would she be the sort of person to have in one’s bedroom if one were ill?” Miss Wordsworth asked. In fact, except for her father, Gertrude had little patience with other people’s problems. She did enjoy the respect of her tutor, Professor Hassall, who praised her work, and she was fortunate to have the company of her childhood companion Horace Marshall. Her cousin was at Trinity College at Oxford, and Gertrude received permission from Miss Wordsworth to go alone with him on “discreet little walks.” Other young men had also come into her life, and although one of her friends from home had announced her engagement, and another had already wed, for Gertrude these flirtations marked the first stirrings of her sexual awakening. She wrote to Florence about her “good friend” Mr. Raper, who took her skating, and the “fascinating” Mr. Cockerel, who invited her to his rooms for tea (always with a chaperone, of course); and on visits to London she enjoyed the company of her handsome cousin-by-marriage Billy Lascelles.