Isabelle: The Life of Isabelle Eberhardt ANNOTATION
A young Russian, Isabelle Eberhardt, fled to North Africa, dressed as an Arab boy and pursued experience-sexual, aesthetic, and mystical-that scandalized Europeans. A biography.
FROM THE CRITICS
Publishers Weekly
This captivating biography describes a turn-of-the-century Russian adventurer who was drawn by her romance with Islam to travel throughout north Africa, writing about the lives of the colonial French and local Arabs . Her colorful career ended abruptly in death at the age of 27 in a torrential flash flood that struck a remote hillside garrison in Algeria. Born in 1877 in Geneva, Eberhardt bore the maiden name of her mother, who had left Russia and her elderly husband, a general, five years earlier to go to Switzerland with her children's tutor, an anarchist. Never sure of her identity, Eberhardt embraced a series of disguises as a teenager and afterward, taking a series of male noms de plume and dressing as a man, which eased her way into the tents and Moslem monasteries of the desert. What was not in question was her sexuality, which was decidedly hetero: Eberhardt's fondness for ``nights of love'' culminated in marriage to an Arab officer in the French colonial cavalry. In this well-researched book, Kobak, a British writer who translated Eberhardt's only published novel, Vagabond , skillfully weaves brief excerpts from her subject's work into her riveting story. Illustrated. (Apr.)
Library Journal
Born in Geneva in 1877, the illegitimate child of a Russian aristocrat who had left her aged husband in Russia and moved to Geneva with her other children and their tutor, her lover, Eberhardt developed her talent for writing and her obsession with Islamic culture as an adolescent. Following the death of her parents, she began her nomadic travels through North Africa, usually wearing male native dress. Kobak, drawing upon Eberhardt's diaries and correspondence, has written a fascinating biography of this complex woman who was so steeped in Islam, yet was a scandal to French settlers in North Africa for her reputed sexual excesses. The object of an assasination attempt, and the victim of political intrigue among French authorities, Eberhardt persevered until her death in a flash flood at the age of 29. Her prose works have survived; Kobak has vividly reconstructed her life.-- Joan W. Gartland, Detroit P.L.
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