They said she couldn’t do it, but... Born in Paris in 1893, at the tail end of the Victorian era, Freya Stark led a singularly extraordinary life. Though she moved about England and Italy with her artist parents throughout her childhood, and never received a formal schooling, she was already a polyglot, fluent in French, German, and Italian, by the time she entered college. After working as a nurse during World War I, she returned to London to take courses at the School of Oriental Studies, and her unquenchable curiosity swept her to Lebanon in 1927—kicking off a life-long love affair with the then-mysterious Middle East. But it wasn’t until 1930 that Stark, by that point fluent in Persian (Farsi), would set out for Persia (modern-day Iran) with just a local guide and a mule, and come upon the fabled and remote Valley of the Assassins, making her the first Westerner to identify it on a map. According to Alexander Maitland, the authorized biographer of Middle East explorer Sir Wilfred Thesiger (both a contemporary and a friend of Stark’s), Stark was “an immensely significant figure” and “one of the relatively rare women explorers” who had the “advantage over the men of being able to get very close terms with the women in Muslim societies,” in turn granting her a much more intimate understanding of the role of women. Stark continued on her travels, despite bouts of the measles and a history of heart trouble; and during World War II, was employed by the British Ministry of Information in Aden, Baghdad, Iraq, and Cairo, where she used her knowledge of the region and its people to counteract Nazi propaganda, meanwhile spearheading the anti-fascist Brotherhood of Freedom movement. Yet her greatest gift, perhaps, was the knowledge she left behind: A prodigious author, Stark wrote a whopping 24 travel books and autobiographies, along with eight volumes of letters, leaving a trail of fascinating information about her adventures in Syria, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, and Yemen—places which are now difficult to experience firsthand.