Freya Stark

(1893 - 1993)

Freya Stark served as a nurse in an ambulance unit in Italy in 1917; became the second woman to climb the east face of Monte Rosa in the Swiss Alps in 1924; and moved to Baghdad in 1929, writing articles for the Baghdad Times and donning Arab attire. She published The Valleys of the Assassins in 1934 and The Southern Gates of Arabia in 1936. During World War II she worked for the Ministry of Information, becoming a propagandist in Yemen and Egypt. She was made a Dame of the British Empire in 1972.