Rosita Forbes

Rosita Forbes, née Joan Rosita Torr (16 January 1890 – 30 June 1967) was an English travel writer and explorer. In 1920-21 she was the first European woman to visit the Kufra Oasis in Libya (together with the Egyptian explorer Ahmed Hassanein), in a period when this was closed to westerners.

Joan Rosita Torr was born at Riseholme Hall, near Lincoln, England, the daughter of Herbert James Torr and Rosita Graham Torr. Her father was a member of Parliament.

During World War I she drove an ambulance in France for two years. From 1917 to 1918, she traveled in Asia with another unhappy military wife, Armorel Meinertzhagen, visiting thirty countries. After the war, she and Meinertzhagen traveled in North Africa, "with little money but much ingenuity." The result was her first book, Unconducted Wanderers (1919). The next year, she pretended to be an Arab woman named "Sitt Khadija" to visit the Kufra Oasis in 1921, the first European woman (and only the second European) known to see that location. The way she portrayed her travel guide, Hassanein Bey, as a minor part of the journey was criticized by her book's reviewers and his colleagues, who pointed out that he was an Oxford-educated diplomat.

Rosita Forbes found an audience as a daring and witty travel writer and lecturer between the wars, and as a novelist; but her reputation was somewhat tarnished in the 1930s by her description of walking through a flower garden with Adolf Hitler, and her meetings with Benito Mussolini. She published a book of interviews in 1940, These Men I Knew, insisting that she was only reporting their politics, not endorsing them; she also lectured in support of the British war effort in Canada and the United States. Soon, the McGraths went to live in the Bahamas to avoid further controversy.

Forbes was made a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, and received medals from the Royal Antwerp Geographical Society and the French Geographical Society, and an award in 1924 from the Royal Society of Arts. She also made an early travel film, From Red Sea to Blue Nile, and two of her novels became silent films (Fighting Love (1927) and The White Sheik (1928), based on her novels If the Gods Laugh and Account Rendered, respectively). Her 1924 biography, The Sultan of the Mountains: The Life of Story of Raisuli, was loosely adapted for the screen in 1972 by John Milius as The Wind and the Lion.

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