Loggia exhibition October 6 2016

National Poetry Day

To celebrate National Poetry Day today, we are showcasing one of the modern treasures of the Somerville library:  Gertrude Bell’s copy of Keats Selected Poetry filled with extra poems of his not contained therein that she handwrote in margins and endpapers.

Gertrude Bell’s (1868-1926) life was a potent mixture of the traditional and the unconventional. She was born into a wealthy, enlightened family of industrialists in the north of England and although she was the first woman ever to take a First in Modern History at Oxford (LMH, 1888), and learned languages like Farsi and Arabic as though they were French or German, she spent the first four years of what might have been a career living meekly at home as her stepmother’s companion. She travelled extensively with her family, becoming an extremely proficient mountaineer, but still wrote to ask her father’s permission before undertaking any journey without him, and never went anywhere without a chaperone. She was an ardent anti-suffragist, campaigning against votes for women with one of Somerville’s founders, the novelist Mrs Humphry Ward. Yet she is celebrated now as one of the most original and independent travellers, explorers and diplomats Britain has ever produced.

After her father died in 1904, Gertrude visited Syria, Iraq. Eastern Turkey and Assyria, writing successful travel books as she went. In 1914 she conceived an expedition into the uncharted heart of Arabia, and though the outbreak of war curtailed her journey, she had still penetrated further into the desert than any other European woman. This undertaking was not just a matter of wanderlust or writerly curiosity: Gertrude had fallen deeply in love with a married British officer stationed in Arabia, and felt that travelling was the only way to cope with his absence when they could not be together. With a hint of Keatsian romance, she once wrote to him ‘I have filled all the hollow places in the world with my desire for you…’ Her lover died at Gallipoli.

To distract herself after his death Gertrude volunteered as a nurse in France and then as a political officer with the Arab Intelligence Bureau in Cairo, later moving to Baghdad as the only female member of the British Expeditionary Force in Mesopotamia. There she stayed, first as political advisor to King Faisal and then as director of the National Museum she founded there in 1923. As her life became less and less demanding – and fulfilling – she grew passive, faded into the Iraqi background, and two days before her 58^th birthday took an overdose and quietly died.

In the back of this volume there are some loose leaves of headed notepaper from Gertrude’s home – Red Barns, near Redcar – on which she has written extra poems not included in the published edition. In fact she has crowded Keats into every available page (the loose leaves are the overflow): this book must have been very precious to her. In summer 2016 a campaign was launched to save Red Barns from development and turn it into a Gertrude Bell Museum, a fitting commemoration of this contradictory and fascinating heroine.