Freya Stark

Freya Stark
Cover of Jane Fletcher Geniesse's 2001 biography of Freya Stark
Born	(1893-01-31)31 January 1893 Paris, France
Died	9 May 1993(1993-05-09) (aged 100) Asolo, Italy
Nationality	British, Italian
Occupation	Explorer, travel writer

Dame Freya Madeline Stark, Mrs Perowne, DBE (31 January 1893 – 9 May 1993) was a British - Italian explorer and travel writer. She wrote more than two dozen books on her travels in the Middle East and Afghanistan, as well as several autobiographical works and essays. She was one of the first non-Arabians to travel through the southern Arabian Deserts.

Stark was born on 31 January 1893 in Paris, where her parents were studying art. Her mother, Flora, was an Italian of Polish/German descent; her father, Robert, an English painter from Devon. 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. Her maternal grandmother lived in Genoa.

Her parents' marriage was unhappy from the outset, and they separated early in Freya's childhood. Stark's biographer, Jane Fletcher Geniesse—quoting Freya's cousin, Nora Stanton Blatch Barney—claimed that Freya's biological father was "a well-to-do young man from a prominent family in New Orleans" named Obediah Dyer. There is no known corroboration of this account, and it is not known if Stark herself was aware of it; she did not make any reference to it in any of her writings, including her autobiography.

For her ninth birthday Freya received a copy of One Thousand and One Nights, and became fascinated with the Orient. She was often ill while young and confined to the house, so she found an outlet in reading. She delighted in reading French, in particular Dumas, and taught herself Latin. When she was 13 she had an accident in a factory in Italy, when her hair got caught in a machine, and she had to spend four months getting skin grafts in hospital, which left her face disfigured. She later learned Arabic and Persian, and studied history at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) at the University of London.

During World War I, Stark trained as a VAD and served initially with G. M. Trevelyan's British Red Cross ambulance unit, based at the Villa Trento near Udine. Her mother had remained in Italy and taken a share in a business; her sister Vera married the co-owner. In November 1927 she visited Asolo for the first time in years. Later that month she boarded a ship for Beirut, where her travels in the East began. She stayed first at the home of James Elroy Flecker in Lebanon, then in Baghdad, Iraq (then a British protectorate), where she met the British high commissioner.