
Novelist Barbara Hambly is writing Anne Steelyard and the Garden of Emptiness: A Honorary Man ($19.95), a 96-page, full color hardcover graphic novel based on the life of Gertrude Bell, the woman responsible for drawing the borders of the modern day state of Iraq. In addition to her fantasy (The Darwath Trilogy) and science fiction novels (she has written both Star Wars and Star Trek novels), Hambly is also a master of historical fiction (Search the Seven Hills, The Emancipator’s Wife, Patriot Hearts) and so a natural choice to write a graphic novel based on the life of Bell.
Gertrude Bell was a fascinating figure, a woman who defied the conventions of the Victorian age by becoming an explorer and an extraordinary linguist. Somewhat surprisingly, the Oxford educated, emancipated Bell, who never married, opposed women’s suffrage. During World War I she continued to break barriers by becoming the only political officer in the British Army and a key member (along with T.E. Lawrence) of the army’s Arab Bureau. After the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, Bell convinced the British to create the state of Iraq out of the three former Ottoman provinces, thus sowing the seeds of the present-day conflicts between Sunni, Shi’ite, and Kurds (each group had held sway in their own Ottoman province). Bell also was insistent that the Sunnis should be the rulers of Iraq, rather than the majority Shi’ites, a group that Bell thought was prone to theocracy (an observation that is borne out today by the kind of government in place in the south of Iraq where Shi’ite rule is unchallenged).