GREAT NEWS - MY NEW BOOK IS IN PRINT!

Wilderness & Paradise 

My new book goes back to my interest in the Middle East inspired by my family connections there. My grandmother was from Basrah in Iraq and my mother grew up there. This book is dedicated to my mother who went alone to work in Sudan teaching just after the Second World war. The foreword of the book tells a little of her story among the tribes of Southern Sudan.

Wilderness & Paradise is a collection of short biographies of women who travelled alone through the deserts of North Africa, Syria and Mesopotamia now called Iraq. Their adventures in love and travel make for exciting stories as they fight their way through the prejudices of the day which dictated that women should stay at home stitching samplers and rearing children. They were involved in politics, archaeology, and a great love of the wildness of the desert and its people. They wrote books and diaries as well as keeping sketch books. 

Read about Lady Hester Stanhope who was the niece of William Pitt the Younger who tried over and over again to be a spy on behalf of England in the struggle for supremacy against France in the Middle East during the Napoleonic wars. 

There is Lady Jane Digby who was the most beautiful debutante of her day who fled to Europe and was drawn ever further East marrying ever more exotic husbands.

Not all of them were so high born. The story of Isabelle Eberhardt tells of her origins as the bastard child of her mother and her family’s tutor and her sense of always being an outsider in the French society she was  brought up in. She takes her love of Islam to the ultimate conclusion when she becomes a moslem.

Gertrude Bell too, though from a very wealthy family had no aristocratic ancestors. She mapped the deserts of Syria and Mesopotamia and it was her knowledge of the area which was used to guide TE Lawrence in his campaign with Bedouin warriors against the Turks in the First World War. 

Agatha Christie is probably too well known to need much explanation but she too went alone to explore the East, attracted by her interest in archaeology and the romance of the ancient world.

Freya Stark had a very unconventional upbringing, and spent most of her childhood in Italy. Always regarded as a foreigner by her contemporaries owing to her foreign accent she nonetheless felt British. She became one of Britain’s most famous travel writers and lived to be a hundred.

The final chapter tells the story of twin Scottish sisters. Their interest in the desert was quite different from the others. They went to discover not Islam but the earliest manuscripts of the Bible hidden away in a remote mountain monastery in Syria. 

The fight to be taken seriously in what was then a man’s world and the hardships of their journeys across the desert show enormous courage and determination - an inspiration to us all.

Available from Hammond Associates. Price £10 plus £2 p&p To order: e-mail johammo1@gmail.com