Stark, Freya, 1893-1993

Freya Madeline Stark was born in Paris on 31 January 1893 to Robert and Flora Stark. The elder Starks--the father of British birth, the mother born on the continent--were cousins and artists. After several years of living at Chagford, Devon and in northern Italy, Robert and Flora Stark separated, and Flora, with Freya and a younger sister Vera, remained in Italy, first at Dronero, and then at Asolo, near Venice.

Freya's fascination with exotic lands is said to have dated from her earliest reading of the British romantic poets, as well as FitzGerald's translation of the Rubaiyat. The future travel writer and explorer developed a keen interest in the Middle East, and, aided by a remarkable skill with languages, quickly began a life-long program of self-education, mastering modern European tongues and eventually classical and Oriental languages. Her principal formal education was at Bedford College, University of London, in the years 1911 to 1914.

After service in World War One as a military nurse in Italy and a postwar period of commercial gardening, Freya decided upon travel in the Near East. This decision was supported by additional language preparation at the London School of Oriental Studies, as well as by her desire to escape from her domineering mother and various family obligations.

Freya Stark's first trip to the Levant began in November, 1927 and was eventually chronicled in Letters from Syria (1942). Her small frame hid a fierce will and a hardy constitution, and Freya refused the usual cosseting tours, preferring to eat, live, and travel as the local populations did. Many of her fellow Britons feared she had gone native, but she realized this was the only path to an authentic knowledge of the Middle East and its peoples.

Stark returned to Lebanon in 1929, and eventually found her way to Baghdad, where her first published work, Baghdad Sketches, appeared in 1932. Journeys into Iran during the years 1929 to 1931 resulted in The Valleys of the Assassins (1934), her first work to achieve wide recognition. Valleys was in fact reprinted three times within a year of its appearance.

At the end of 1934, Freya Stark's first expedition into Arabia was eventually terminated when she contracted measles and, upon relapse, had to be rescued by the British Royal Air Force. Another Arabian expedition was also ended by serious illness in 1938. Despite these hardships enough was accomplished for her to publish The Southern Gates of Arabia, Seen in the Hadhramaut, and A Winter in Arabia between 1936 and 1940.

During the Second World War Freya Stark placed her knowledge of the Middle East at the service of Britain's Ministry of Information. She worked to counter Axis propaganda among the populations of the region and helped found the Arab Brotherhood of Freedom, an anti-Nazi organization.

In 1947, Freya Stark married Stewart Perowne, a British diplomat she had known since the late 1930s, and with him she moved first to Barbados and then to Libya. The marriage did not prosper, and in 1952 they separated. Despite this setback and her absence from the Middle East, Stark was able to publish three volumes of autobiography in the years between 1950 and 1953, followed by a fourth in 1961.

Freya Stark discovered a new interest in Asia Minor in the 1950s. This soon led to her learning Turkish and setting out on a series of difficult journeys, often on horseback, to the far corners of Anatolia. Ionia: A Quest (1954), The Lycian Shore (1956), Alexander's Path (1958), Riding on the Tigris (1959), and Rome on the Euphrates (1966) were published as a result.

After Freya Stark was, in 1972, created a Dame of the British Empire she continued her arduous regimen with travel by horseback in the Himalayas, as well as rafting down the Euphrates. Only as infirmity overcame her in her final decade did she slow down. Dame Freya died a centenarian at Asolo on 9 May 1993.