The vibrant Vita Sackville-West was one of the last British visitors to Gertrude Bell’s Baghdad home in 1926, a few months before Bell’s tragic death from an overdose. The two women were quite different in age, temperament and outlook, but had much in common, not least that they were forces of nature with gripping personal stories and a penchant for rattling the bars of their gilded, gendered cages. Both were the snobbish sort of gender-rebels, drawn together by social class, financial privilege and circumstance. Despite being denied positions, opportunities and property through not being born male, neither of them were particularly feminist. Rich women like Vita and Gertrude didn’t need to be.

Vita Sackville-West and Gertrude Bell were true top-flight colonial Brits abroad in the post-Great War years, able to afford to travel and live as it suited them in countries like Persia and the then newly-formed Iraq, helping to shape the kaleidoscopically complicated political landscape in the Middle East in keeping with British interests while ostensibly supporting Arab self-determination. Between them they personally knew the new royal families of the Middle East and moved easily in circles of diplomats, military leaders and politicians.

London, Constantinople and Paris

Sackville-West and Bell’s paths had crossed previously in London, on the dinner party circuit of the upper classes who inhabited Belgravia, Mayfair and Bloomsbury. Both women were used to spending seasons in the country (Kent and Yorkshire respectively) as well as time in their London homes entertaining guests and visiting acquintances. Vita married at the age of 21 - her marriage to bisexual Harold Nicholson was fairly open even by modern standards - and Gertrude remained single. A form of freedom came to them differently.

The women met again in Constantinople in 1914 prior to the outbreak of war. Gertrude Bell had become an accomplished desert traveller, archaeologist and photographer, and had not long completed her remarkable journey of 1913-14 across huge swathes of difficult terrain, crossing and recrossing the Arabian peninsula, making maps and taking photographs.

Constantinople was a stopping off point on her way back to London. Rumours of Bell’s exploits quickly spread and she was much in demand to tell the tales of her adventures. She was invited to dine at the home of Philip Graves the Times correspondent, where, it is reported, she puffed away on her habitual cigarettes. Also present were the recently married young diplomat Harold Nicholson and his pregnant wife Vita Sackville-West.

Vita was later to recall, ‘I had known her first in Constantinople where she'd arrived straight out of the desert with all the evening dresses, cutlery and napery she insisted on taking with her on her wanderings’.

After World War One the women met again, this time in Paris. Harold was by now a diplomat, and Gertrude Bell was also present at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference. Bell was the only female delegate and was in the company of T H Lawrence, both political advisors to British politicians about British-Arab interests in the collapsed post-Ottoman turmoil of the Middle East. (Bell and Lawrence would meet again at the Cairo Peace Conference in 1921.)

Gertrude Bell wrote to her father Sir Hugh Bell from her Paris hotel on the 18th March 1919, thanking him for his recent visit to see her and cheering her spirits. She added, as she so frequently did, plenty of pen-portraits of prople and political intrigue:

Last night I dined with the Nicolsons - Mrs Vita was over for a day. She is a most attractive creature and would be more so if she didn't whiten her nose so very white. But today we should all have been well advised to do the same for our noses were different shades of magenta owing to the atrocious cold. I sat in Sir Arthur Hirtzel's office all morning - like the dog in Fredericks' seat - huddled as near as I could get to the hot water pipes and wrote some pages of comments on French complaints of our behaviour in Mesopotamia. Nothing more absurd than this document has met my eye - they really are an amazing people. T.E. Lawrence and I arranged to lunch together. As we were standing in the hall Lord Milner came in. Said Mr Lawrence "You go and ask him to lunch with us." So I, as bold as brass, invited him; he accepted and we had a delightful and most unofficial hour during which we got a good many useful things said. He also talked very interestingly and not very hopefully of the programme which is to be laid before the Germans but as he bound us over not to quote him as an authority I won't go into details. We assured him that people who lunched with us always were indiscreet. It's Mr Lawrence, I think, who induces a sort of cards on the table atmosphere.

And finally, the Treaty of Versailles was signed and the Great War was over, although the political direction of the Middle East was far from determined. Bell for her part returned to Baghdad to work on the establishment of Iraq, and in 1925 Harold Nicolson was posted to Teheran.

Vita and Gertrude had apparently liked each other enough to keep in touch, and later for Bell to extend an invitation to Vita to visit her in Baghdad when on her own travels to join her husband.

Love of Gardens, Persia and Travel

Both women were keen gardeners - planters and designers - Bell making her mark at the family country house at Rounton, Yorkshire; and Sackville-West to great acclaim in her later years at Sissinghurst, Kent.

Unsurprisingly both adored the landscapes, gardens and buildings of Persia, and wrote about it as part of their copious outputs of letters, journals and books. Bell’s memories of Persia would always be tied up with her first doomed relationship, which involved a failed engagement to a young attaché called Henry Cadogan whom she met in Tehran while visiting her diplomat uncle. It was a splendidly romantic episode set ‘in the middle of the Arabian Nights’ as Gertrude herself wrote, with a disastrously ignominious ending. It was also the moment where Gertrude learned at the age of 23 that her father could and would put his foot down and refuse her wishes. The engagement was not permitted for reasons of Henry’s gambling debts; and he was later found dead in a frozen river in the Persian hills.

Visiting Persia in 1891 had been one of Bell’s great ambitions, and while the Cadogan episode was something of a failure, the trip began a lifetime of travels and adventures in the Middle East, more and more on her own terms.

For Vita Sackville-West, Persia was bound up with her marriage to Harold. Despite her family’s misgiving’s about her suitor’s relative penury, Vita had been allowed to marry her convenient diplomat. Harold was posted to Tehran from 1925 to 1927 and Vita was happy to visit. Her book A Passenger To Teheran published in 1926 recounts her circuitous journey and her involvement in the coronation of the new Shah Reza Khan.

But before she arrived in Persia, she detoured to visit Baghdad and Gertrude.

Gertrude and Vita in Baghdad

‘I had Vita Nicolson with me for two days. She arrived on Saturday morning for breakfast and left on Sunday night after an early dinner - which I didn't share for we had our usual bridge party at Ken's [Kinahan Cornwallis] house that night. She was most agreeable.’ So wrote Gertrude Bell in a letter home on the 3rd March 1926. Her letter continued:

The Cookes lunched on Saturday and we went to the bazaars after and on to tea with the King, whom she loved. The Higgins pair came to dinner, Iltyd and Mr Clarke, banker and friend of Sylvia's. Quite pleasant. On Sunday, Ken took us to the Sarai where we saw the Museum and were joined there by Colonel Martin and Major Roughton, the two officers who are studying the defence of the 'Iraq for Simla - delightful, both of them. We went afterwards to look at the Citadel. Lionel lunched and Mr Edmonds, Ken's second in command. Lionel had travelled out with Harold Nicolson as far as Alexandria and they had made friends, so Vita wanted to see him. Ken took us out in the afternoon, to Mu'adhdham [Azamiyah, Al] and Kadhimain [(Al Kazimiyah)] - there's now a bridge of boats up there connecting them so it makes a nice giro. After tea she packed and then went away by train so it makes a nice giro. After tea she packed and then went away by train to Khanaqin, while I dined and played Bridge (having seen her off) with Ken, Iltyd and Major Roughton. The last plays an admirable game.

Vita of the Bloomsbury Set

Vita Sackville-West was nearly 34 years old when she visited 57 year old Gertrude Bell in Baghdad, and she had already been married to Harold for 13 years. She was already well known within her own circles for her ‘wild spirits’ and artistic temperament, as well as her love affairs with a number of women. She had also had a torrid relationship in 1924 with historian Geoffrey Scott. Like many in the Bloomsbury Group set, Vita and Harold enjoyed an open marriage, both engaging in same-sex relationships. Marriage to such a man had its advantages for a woman like Vita. In 1922 Vita had met Virginia Woolf, and their affair - during which Vita became the muse for Orlando - began in 1925 and lasted for a decade.

How much of this Gertrude Bell knew is not clear; but Bell was neither a stupid nor a naive woman and was likely to have been very well aware of Vita’s reputation and foibles. Gertrude Bell herself knew Virginia Woolf through the dinner party circuit of London; and she was not so easily shocked. Bell though unmarried was capable of extremes of passion and emotion, evidenced by her correspondence with (married) ‘Dick’ Doughty-Wylie during the Great War and her hankering after (married) Ken Cornwallis in Baghdad. In fact the timing of Vita’s visit in early 1926 took place not too long after Bell’s realisation that she was never going to know the sanctity and companionship of being the second Mrs Cornwallis - his feelings on the matter, after his hushed-up divorce in 1924, had been made clear.

Bell may well have envied her young friend Vita’s security and paradoxical freedoms, as the storm-clouds of her own worlds in Baghdad and England began to circle overhead. Gertrude was receiving an almost constant stream of bad news about deaths and ill-health, and had financial worries hanging over her; and having to absorb the blows took its toll, no matter how hard she worked on her political reports and how conscientious she was in cataloguing the artefacts in her museum.

A Weekend In Dusty Baghdad

Vita, the beautiful socialite butterfly, alighted at Gertrude’s door for a weekend visit, leaving on the Sunday night train to continue her journey to her husband in Tehran. She witnessed the tail-end of Bell the social whirligig and wrote of her visit with huge enthusiasm, describing Gertrude in glowing and affectionate terms.

The passage from her book Passenger to Teheran is worth repeating in its entirety:

I confess that I was startled by the roads of Bagdad, especially after we had turned out of the main street and drove between high, blank walls along a track still studded with the stumps of palm trees recently felled; the mud was not dry here and we skidded and slithered, hitting a tree-stump and getting straightened on our course again, racketing along, tilting occasionally at an angle which defied all the laws of balance, and which in England would certainly have overturned the more conventionally minded motor.

Then: a door in the blank wall, a jerky stop, a creaking of hinges, a broadly smiling servant, a rush of dogs, a vista of garden path edged with carnations in pots, a little verandah and a little low house at the end of the path, an English voice—Gertrude Bell.

I had known her first in Constantinople, where she had arrived straight out of the desert, with all the evening dresses and cutlery and napery that she insisted on taking with her on her wanderings; and then in England; but here she was in her right place, in Iraq, in her own house, with her office in the city, and her white pony in a corner of the garden, and her Arab servants, and her English books, and her Babylonian shards on the mantelpiece, and her long thin nose, and her irrepressible vitality. I felt all my loneliness and despair lifted from me in a second. Had it been very hot in the Gulf? got fever, had I? but quinine would put that right; and a sprained ankle,—too bad!—and would I like breakfast first, or a bath? and I would like to see her museum, wouldn't I? did I know she was Director of Antiquities in Iraq? wasn't that a joke? and would I like to come to tea with the King? and yes, there were lots of letters for me. I limped after her as she led me down the path, talking all the time, now in English to me, now in Arabic to the eager servants. She had the gift of making every one feel suddenly eager; of making you feel that life was full and rich and exciting. I found myself laughing for the first time in ten days. The garden was small, but cool and friendly; her spaniel wagged not only his tail but his whole little body; the pony looked over the loose-box door and whinnied gently; a tame partridge hopped about the verandah; some native babies who were playing in a corner stopped playing to stare and grin. A tall, grey sloughi came out of the house, beating his tail against the posts of the verandah; "I want one like that," I said, "to take up into Persia." I did want one, but I had reckoned without Gertrude's promptness. She rushed to the telephone, and as I poured cream over my porridge I heard her explaining—a friend of hers had arrived—must have a sloughi at once—was leaving for Persia next day—a selection of sloughis must be sent round that morning. Then she was back in her chair, pouring out information: the state of Iraq, the excavations at Ur, the need for a decent museum, what new books had come out? what was happening in England? The doctors had told her she ought not to go through another summer in Bagdad, but what should she do in England, eating out her heart for Iraq? Next year, perhaps ... but I couldn't say she looked ill, could I? I could, and did. She laughed and brushed that aside. Then, jumping up—for all her movements were quick and impatient—if I had finished my breakfast wouldn't I like my bath? and she must go to her office, but would be back for luncheon. Oh yes, and there were people to luncheon; and so, still talking, still laughing, she pinned on a hat without looking in the glass, and took her departure.

It’s clear from Vita’s own account that Gertrude was determined to be charming and helpful and to appear in good spirits to the woman she knew as ‘Vita Nicolson’. It’s intriguing that Gertrude could only bring herself to describe Vita, in a letter home to her father Sir Hugh Bell, as ‘most agreeable’. There was no effusive praise and no emotion. This was perhaps either to dampen down any potential concern that her father might have had about the friendship with the notorious socialite; or Bell was perhaps tiring of the over-enthusiastic descriptions of fellow British upper class travellers in Iraq. As Vita had noted, Gertrude did not look particularly well.

During their two days together in Baghdad, Bell and Sackville-West talked of their shared interest in Mesopotamia and agreed to meet up one day at the ancient settlement on Tseisephon, on the banks of the Tigris, where excavations were planned to take place over the next few years.

Virginia Woolf

The visit did not escape the attention of Vita’s long-term lover Virginia Woolf. Bell’s biographer HVF Winstone calls the letter that Woolf subsequently sent to Vita on her travels, ‘one of those skittish, opinionated letters in which the writer specialized’:

‘Now where are you? With Miss Gertrude Bell, I suppose. I suppose you are very happy, seeing things, lovely things. I don’t know what Baghdad is like so I won’t tell you. Miss Bell has a very long nose: she is like an Aberdeen terrier; she is a masterful woman, has everyone under her thumb, and makes you feel a little inefficient. Still, she is extremely kind, and askes so and so to meet you, and you are very grateful to her …’

Virginia Woolf already knew Gertrude Bell and ‘the Hugh Bells’ i.e. the Bell family. She first met Gertrude’s younger sisters Molly and Elsa when she was 18 years old at a Trinity May Ball in Cambridge and known as Miss Virginia Stephen.

Writing afterwards to her friend Emma Vaughan in June 1900 she described the Bells as ‘brilliant girl conversationalists’. Gertrude herself at the time was travelling, mostly on horseback, around the jebels of Palestine, Syria and Lebanon. It is likely that Virginia heard all about her, as the Bell family exchanged news letters by post very frequently.

End Days

But times changed; and the aftermath of the Great War, the social and economic unrest that led to the General Strike, personal circumstances and simply the passage of time led to dislocating upheavals in the women’s lives.

Vita’s observation that her friend appeared ill was prescient. Gertrude Bell was dead four months later in her Baghdad home, dispatched by a self-administered overdose of her barbituate sleeping draught Dial.

Vita Sackville-West went on to literary success, and as an act of friendship she wrote a preface to the 1937 posthumous reprint of Bell’s Persian Pictures; and she further became known as something of a celebrity gardener at Sissinghurst, Kent until her death in 1962.

Bell’s and Sackville-West’s remains are buried in Baghdad and Withyam in East Sussex respectively, and they both leave remarkable legacies having been women shaped by their times and their social positions, but determined to live, to love and to have influence and agency. As much as they were authors of their own scenes of destruction, they were the agents of their own successes.

Vita lived a relatively long life, but Virginia Woolf like Gertrude Bell cut hers short. Woolf died by drowning in 1941, filling her coat pockets with rocks and throwing herself into the River Ouse.

They were three truly extraordinary women of literature and landscapes, and of the sorrows. Their lives were hollowed out by patriarchy, and often by the vicissitudes of their husbands and the husbands-that-were-not-to-be, but they created legacies.

And how, after all, it it possible to judge these women, Gertrude Bell, Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf? Through the lens of how privileged they were, how orientalist, how elite? Through the lens of literary criticism and intertextual analysis? Or through a lens of how resolute they could be about their desires around their sexuality, their lives and their unstoppable drive to commit their thoughts in writing to paper? Which of course circles back to their privilege … It is an eternal puzzle for modern observers and analysts, particularly those like me so far from their class and background. But they remain key historical figures amidst the confusing kaleidoscope of the early 20th century, punching through the terrain of a patriarchal world that still depressingly exists with all its traps and barbs.

‘Tough, sensitive but tough.’

- E M Forster on Virginia Woolf

But the last word must not belong to a man. I give it to Gertrude Bell.

‘I have known the loneliness in solitude now, for the first time, and in the long days of camel riding and in the long evenings of winter camping, my thoughts have gone wandering far from the camp fire into places which I wish were not so full of acute sensation. Sometimes I have gone to bed with a heart so heavy that I thought that I could not carry it through the next day. Then comes the soft dawn, stealing over the wide plain and down the long slopes of the little hollows, and in the end it steals into my dark heart also … That’s the best I can make of it, taught at least some wisdom by solitude, taught submission, and how to bear the pain without crying out.’

Sources, Acknowledgements and Further Reading

Gertrude Bell Archive, Newcastle University

Letters From Baghdad (documentary by Sabine Krayenbühl & Zeva Oelbaum) https://www.lettersfrombaghdad.com/

Gertrude Bell 1937 (3rd edition) Persian Pictures with Introduction by Vita Sackville-West

HVF Winstone 1978 Gertrude Bell. Quartet; New York [see esp pp 57 and 255]

Janet Wallach 1996 Desert Queen. The extraordinary life of Gertrude Bell

Georgina Howell 2006 Daughter of the Desert: The Remarkable Life of Gertrude Bell

Hermione Lee 2002 ‘The Muse and the Widger’ Guardian article https://www.theguardian.com/books/2002/jun/22/biography.classics

Vita Sackville-West 1926 Passenger to Teheran

https://www.theliteraryshed.co.uk/read/the-literary-traveller/vita-sackville-west-in-her-beloved-garden-sissinghurst

https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2020/03/31/the-fabulous-forgotten-life-of-vita-sackville-west/

https://www.churchillbookcollector.com/pages/books/006673/gertrude-bell-vita-sackville-west/persian-pictures

https://screenanarchy.com/2016/11/exclusive-clip-letters-from-baghdad.html

Karina Jakubowicz 2017 Gardens in the Work of Virginia Woolf PhD thesis UCL