The ruse worked rather well for her, particularly on the road, where feigned ignorance might help avoid recriminations for straying off approved routes. In her work The Valleys of the Assassins, Freya Stark writes: 'The great and almost only comfort about being a woman is that one can always pretend to be more stupid than one is and no one is surprised' ( 2001: 49). Keywords: Baghdad, Gertrude Bell, Ethel Drawer, journalism, life-writing, Freya Stark

The article not only highlights the plurality of autobiographical presentation characteristic of Stark's oeuvre, but also reveals how Stark refashioned her experiences throughout her life, taking into account her changing status and the different political and cultural climates in which the works were published.

Furthermore, the article discusses Stark's work at the Baghdad Times, a literary apprenticeship that also led to the publication of Baghdad Sketches. Stark's experiences, and those of Drawer, reveal the ways in which British women resisted the mundane expatriate lifestyle, and gained a great deal of cultural understanding though their interaction with Iraqis. The article focuses on Stark's resistance to expected feminine norms of the British community, and contextualizes her experience alongside that of Gertrude Bell and Stefana Drawer. This article examines Freya Stark's life-writing over a forty-year period in order to shed light on her experience of Baghdad from 1929 to 1933.

Baghdad Sketches by Freya Stark