3 Autograph Letters Signed (“Freya”): Cairo [Egypt], Dec. 15, 1940, 2pp.; Carmel Sanatorium, Haifa-Ahuza, Mount Carmel [Palestine]. Sept. 14, 1941. 4pp., and Villa Treviso, Venezia [Italy], May 9, 1945. 2pp. All to Christopher [Scaife]
The 48 year-old British woman whom Lawrence of Arabia called “gallant” and “remarkable” was working as a semi-secret British propagandist in the Middle East when she wrote these letter to Scaife, the former gay actor, journalist and long-time English Professor at an Egyptian university who worked closely with her to cultivate pro-Allied Arab students in Egypt and Iraq. Stark herself had an incredible background as a young adventurer, sailing in the 1920s for Lebanon, where she learned Arabic and then explored remote regions of Iran and Yemen and southern Arabian deserts where no western woman had ever traveled before. Stark’s letters are uncommon, and those written during her wartime service as a British agent are particularly rare.
Her 1940 letter, dated the day of a great British victory over Mussolini’s Army in Egypt and Libya, thanked Scaife, about to “go off into the desert”, for all his help during the first year of War.” The following year found her convalescing at a Jewish sanatorium in British Palestine (“a glorious view, no houses in sight, pine woods and sea, excellent food, a good doctor and all sorts of massage… so lovely to sit and read Dryden all by oneself in the pinewoods”) after a harrowing experience while besieged in the British Embassy in Baghdad during a pro-Nazi military coup d’etat. She then wrote about their future “arcane” plans for “The Brethren”, the group of 1500 young Arabs they had organized to support the Allied war effort; despite British diplomats who feared that “anything enthusiastic and Egyptian would be dangerous”, she hoped to link the Cairo and Baghdad groups as “a sort of entente cordiale of pro-British fraternities”. The last letter was written at war’s end, when she was again recuperating from the strains of Baghdad intrigue, this time at a villa in liberated Italy, “in spite of the depression and poverty…a lovely and livable land”, where she found “immense joy to get back into the main stream of civilization” and reflected that “the Mediterranean still is the main stream door…not of Europe or politics or powers, but of civilized ways of life…”