35 Facts About Freya Stark

Dame Freya Madeline Stark was a British-Italian explorer and travel writer.

Freya Stark wrote more than two dozen books on her travels in the Middle East and Afghanistan as well as several autobiographical works and essays.

Freya Stark was one of the first non-Arabs known to travel through the southern Arabian Desert in modern times.

Freya Stark's father, Robert, was an English painter from Devon.

Freya Stark spent much of her childhood in northern Italy, helped by the fact that Pen Browning, a friend of her father, had bought three houses in Asolo.

Freya Stark was often ill while young and confined to the house, so she found an outlet in reading.

Freya Stark delighted in reading French, in particular Alexandre Dumas.

Freya Stark had to spend four months getting skin grafts in hospital, which left her face disfigured.

Freya Stark usually wore hats or bonnets, often flamboyant ones, to cover her scars.

At the age of 30, hoping to escape her life as a flower farmer in northern Italy, Freya Stark chose to study languages at university.

Freya Stark studied at Bedford College, London and the School of Oriental and African Studies.

Freya Stark's mother had remained in Italy and taken a share in a business; her sister Vera married the co-owner.

Freya Stark stayed first at the home of James Elroy Flecker in Lebanon, then in Baghdad, Iraq, where she met the British high commissioner.

Freya Stark kept the journey secret as Syria and Lebanon were under French control as the Mandate for Syria and the Lebanon.

Freya Stark described these explorations in The Valleys of the Assassins.

Freya Stark received the Royal Geographical Society's Back Award in 1933.

In 1934, Freya Stark sailed down the Red Sea to Aden to begin a new adventure.

Freya Stark hoped to trace the frankincense route of the Hadhramaut, the hinterland of southern Arabia.

Freya Stark's goal was to reach the ancient city of Shabwa, which was rumoured to have been the capital of the Queen of Sheba.

Freya Stark reasoned that slavery seemed to decline in less religious societies, and thus she felt that slavery would decline in Arabia as it evolved.

Freya Stark published her account of the region in three books, The Southern Gates of Arabia: A Journey in the Hadhramaut, Seen In The Hadhramaut and A Winter in Arabia.

Freya Stark encouraged them to bring their friends and the discussions expanded to cover not only the war but its effects on Egypt.

The work involved Freya Stark travelling all over Egypt and often speaking for as many as 10 hours a day.

Freya Stark agreed and spent the next two years in Iraq dispensing British propaganda.

Freya Stark believed that since it had been given to her, she could sell it.

In 1943, Freya Stark went on an official tour of the British Mandate of Palestine.

Freya Stark gave speeches calling for quotas on Jewish migration to Palestine, which angered the global Jewish community.

However, Freya Stark felt that she was not at all anti-Jewish; she simply felt that Arab consent should be considered before mass migration took place.

Freya Stark travelled to visit the twelfth-century Minaret of Jam.

Freya Stark, as well as being a writer, was a prolific and accomplished photographer.

Smaller collections of photographs by Freya Stark are held at the Biblioteca Berenson, Villa I Tatti, Harvard University Centre for Italian Renaissance Studies Repository, in the Harry Ransom Centre, the University of Texas, at the Special Collections of the University of New South Wales, Canberra, and in the Conway Library whose archive, of primarily architectural images, is being digitised under the wider Courtauld Connects project.

In 1934, Freya Stark was awarded the Royal Asiatic Society's Richard Burton Memorial Medal in recognition of her contribution to geographic exploration and travel writing and a portrait of her resides in the society's lecture room.

Freya Stark was appointed a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the 1972 New Year's Honours.

Freya Stark died at Asolo on 9 May 1993, a few months after her hundredth birthday.

Perowne was homosexual, which Freya Stark did not know when they first married, although most of his friends did.