25
31 August 1939, Container 20.5 (Harry St John Philby), Series II
Correspondence, 1893–1985, Harry Ransom Center, The University of
Texas, Austin, TX [HRC].
- Freya Stark, East Is West (London: John Murray, 1945), 3.
- Freya Stark to Robert Stark, 27 November 1929, in Lucy Moorehead, ed.,
Freya Stark Letters, vol. 1 (1914–1930) (Salisbury: Compton Russell,
1974), 218.
- Harold Nicolson would describe Stark in early middle age as a ‘funny for-
eign little thing.’ Harold Nicolson, Diaries and Letters: 1930–1964
(London: Collins, 1971), 381.
- During the 1930s, Stark also acquired Russian and Farsi, though her
degree of fluency remains unclear. As a ‘despairing student’ of Arabic, she
certainly hoped that she could learn to speak it better than Gertrude Bell,
T.E. Lawrence, or Lord Kitchener, none of whom, she claimed, spoke it
well. Stark to Young, 8 November 1929, in Moorehead, ed., Freya Stark
Letters, vol. 1, 212.
- See Appendix A.
- Jane Fletcher Geniesse, Passionate Nomad: The Life of Freya Stark (New
York: Modern Library, 2001), 80.
- See note 36.
- The friend was Venetia Buddicom, who does not appear to have had any
connection with British intelligence.
- Stark climbed the Matterhorn in 1923 (the year of Ker’s death) and scaled
the massive east face of Monte Rosa a year later via the daunting Marinelli
couloir (the second woman ever to do so), ostensibly (in her own words)
‘to test her nerve.’ This fact and much of the basic information about
Stark’s early years and her activities during the interwar period is derived
from three relatively reliable biographies: Jane Fletcher Geniesse, Passionate
Nomad: The Life of Freya Stark (New York: Modern Library, 2001); Molly
Izzard, Freya Stark: A Biography (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1993);
and Caroline Moorehead, Freya Stark (London: Allison & Busby, 2014).
For a more literary view by her godson, who has also published some inter-
esting collections of Stark’s photographs, see Malise Ruthven, ‘A Subversive
Imperialist: Reappraising Freya Stark’, Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics
26 (2006): 147–67. There is also a recent magazine article of some inter-
est: Claudia Roth Pierpoint, ‘East is West: Freya Stark’s Travels in Arabia’,
The New Yorker, 18 April 2011. However, all five authors turn a blind eye
to the possibility that many of Stark’s early activities were programmed and
directed rather than spontaneous.
- Geniesse, Passionate Nomad, 108. See Appendix A for a complete list of
Stark’s reconnaissance missions and cartographic surveys during the inter-
war years.
PROLOGUE: OF SPIES, SCOUTS, AND COVER
