Newspaper Article

The Romance of the Road

Drabelle, Dennis

1999

Overview

Sometimes it's just as well not to know too much about an admired figure. Dame Freya Stark had long been a favorite of mine: by all appearances a brave and dogged explorer who resorted to disguise when necessary to gain access to restricted parts of the Muslim world, a scarred woman who compensated for her lack of beauty by wielding a formidable charm, a sharp-eyed observer of cultural differences, a hardy soul who lived to be 100 (dying in 1993), a writer of exuberant, witty travelogues that are the literary equivalents of top- notch champagne. Some of these attributes have withstood Jane Fletcher Geniesse's fine biography, but not all. Geniesse shows that at times Freya Stark committed follies that obliged the British government to step in and save her. Such was her appeal and luck, however, that the public put a glamorous spin on these incidents -- a dramatic rescue was thought to prove the mettle of the party who had flung herself in harm's way. As with other 20th-century British adventurers and explorers of the Mideast -- Bertram Thomas, St. John Philby and Wilfred Thesiger come to mind -- it was the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the consequent opening of previously closed regions to outsiders that allowed Stark to set her course. She prepared for a lifetime's travels by studying Arabic, on her own and with a tutor, for seven years. She was late in shoving off, however, because of her attachment to her overbearing mother, Flora, who had separated from Freya's father and gone into business with Mario di Roascio, an Italian nobleman and the husband of Freya's sister. Mario and Flora schemed idealistically and endlessly to boost the economy of Dronero, the provincial seat of his family, by employing local workers in a rug- and basket-making venture. It was on an inspection tour of their factory that Freya, then 13, had been disfigured. Her long hair got caught in a piece of machinery, and, as Geniesse tells it, \"she was yanked violently toward the ceiling. Mario extricated her by grabbing her legs, but the cost was high: Half her scalp was ripped off, including her right ear; the right eyelid was pulled away; and all the tissue around her temple exposed.\" Long afterward, until she could take advantage of progress in plastic surgery, Stark was rarely seen in public without a hat.

• Publisher: WP Company LLC d/b/a The Washington Post
• Subject: Biographies / Books-titles / Geniesse, Jane Fletcher / Nonfiction / Passionate Nomad: The Life of Freya Stark / Stark, Freya