With Lady Anne Blunt and Gertrude Bell, Freya Stark completes the triumvirate of renowned British women travellers to Arabia. Like Doughty, her motivation to travel may have been to escape an unhappy background as well as to find freedom in unfamiliar and exotic places. Brought up in Asolo in northern Italy – where she lived with her mother and sister – at the age of 12 Freya was injured in an accident in the basket factory her mother had set up for her Italian lover. Educated at Bedford College, London, she spent the early years of the Great War as a nurse, only starting to travel in the Middle East relatively late when in her early thirties, having studied briefly at the London School of Oriental Studies in 1927. She then lived for periods in Damascus and Baghdad, her first piece of writing, Baghdad Sketches, appearing in 1933 and Letters from Syria in 1942. Two books on her travels in southern Arabia are: The Southern Gates of Arabia and Winter in Arabia (1940). While frequently celebrated for her romantic view of Eastern lands and closeness to the peoples amongst whom she travelled, and for her spirit of independence that resulted in run-ins with British colonial officials (‘she was denounced for having challenged authority and forsaken her European character’ (En-Nehas, LTE: 1136)) it is sometimes overlooked that during her earlier Middle East travels, Stark was actually working for the British government.