#isabelle eberhardt

[molecoledigiorni]

Più lontano lascio il passato dietro di me, più sono vicina a forgiare il mio carattere.

- Isabelle Eberhardt

[onekindredspirit]

“If Alexander Trophimowsky had not taken complete charge of his daughter’s education and upbringing, no one would ever have heard of Isabelle Eberhardt. By obliging her to perform hard physical labor outdoors alongside her brothers during her childhood and adolescence, he made it possible for her to withstand the rigors of the spartan life she was to live later on. By insisting that she appear regularly, dressed in men’s clothing, not only at home but also in public, he assured her the subsequent ease she felt in wearing male disguise, a device which was to prove a sine qua non in the Sahara. Had he not bought her a horse and taught her to ride it properly while she was still a child, she would have had no mobility in the desert. He saw to it that she grew up a polyglot, even teaching her to read and write Classical Arabic, when she asked for it. Trophimowsky had been a friend of Bakunin and was himself a Nihilist, full of untried theories about education; he allowed his daughter to have no contact with the Swiss among whom they lived. Very early he instilled in her a healthy contempt for the values of bourgeois society. Indifference to public opinion was essential if she was to be able to lead the kind of life she demanded.” Paul Bowles - Preface to the 1975 City Lights edition of The Oblivion Seekers

Images - 21 October from Patti Smith’s “A Book of Days” and 1975 City Lights edition of The Oblivion Seekers

[myfavoritepeterotoole]

Peter O'Toole and Mathilda May photo by Bertrand Laforet

caption : French actress Mathilda May and Irish actor Peter O'Toole stand next to each other in a corridor, on the set of the Australian movie Isabelle Eberhardt. first March 1990

Isabelle Eberhardt (1991) directed by Ian Pringle

Mathilda May as Isabelle Eberhardt

Peter O'Toole as Maj. Lyautey

[madamemarmot]

Like the others she got drunk on absinthe and spent endless hours sitting in her doorway, a cigarette in her mouth, and with her hands folded on her crossed knee. "Achoura" in The Oblivion Seekers by Isabelle Eberhardt

[lilithsaintcrow]

“Possibly due to her lack of connections in Europe, her writing has not enjoyed as much recognition as it deserves. In an age when Bedouin-Oriental romanticism was defining the work of travel writers such as Pierre Loti, Eberhardt wrote almost exclusively about the dehumanizing effects of French rule on the Maghreb.”

Isabelle Eberhardt: Travel’s Rebel with a Cause - JSTOR Daily

A hash-smoking, cross-dressing woman traveling the Sahara in the early 1900s, Eberhardt unpicked the fabric of society just by being herself

[thestateofardadreaming]

Source

[fortezzabastiani]

Portrait of space, Lee Miller

-Ora più che mai capisco che non potrò essere felice costretta in una vita sedentaria, e che sarò sempre ossessionata dal desiderio di un altrove assolato. Isabelle Eberhardt-

[nobeerreviews]

I will always be haunted by thoughts of a sun-drenched elsewhere.

-- Isabelle Eberhardt