The elegant, perceptive journalism of Georgina Howell, who has died aged 73, entertained and informed readers of British and American magazines for 40 years, until she retired to Brittany in 2000 to write Daughter of the Desert, a biography of Gertrude Bell, the explorer, linguist and archaeologist who was the British government’s oriental secretary in Iraq in the 1920s.
Bell, whose life has since been made into a film, directed by Werner Herzog and starring Nicole Kidman, was Georgina’s heroine: an early feminist, the first woman to gain a first in modern history at Oxford, the first to achieve senior rank in British military intelligence and the first to win respect and to be treated as an equal by the establishment in Britain and rulers in the Middle East. The biography, published in 2006 and later retitled Queen of the Desert, was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson prize. Georgina also edited Bell’s writings in A Woman in Arabia (2015), for Penguin Classics.
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