Isabelle Eberhardt (1877–1904)
Author of The Oblivion Seekers and Other Writings
About the Author
Works by Isabelle Eberhardt
Mes journaliers. Précédés de la Vie tragique de la bonne nomade, par René Louis Doyon (1985) 4 copies, 2 reviews
I cercatori di oblio 2 copies
País de arena: relatos argelinos (Letras del Oriente y del Mediterráneo) (Spanish Edition) (2000) 1 copy
Criminal 1 copy
Sandmeere Tagwerke 1 copy
Južnooranske i druge priče 1 copy
Associated Works
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Canonical name
- Eberhardt, Isabelle
- Legal name
- Eberhardt, Isabelle Wilhelmine Marie
- Other names
- Essadi, Si Mahmoud
Podolinsky, Nicolas - Birthdate
- 1877-02-17
- Date of death
- 1904-10-21
- Gender
- female
- Occupations
- explorer
writer
journalist - Relationships
- Moerder, Nathalie (mother)
Trophimowsky, Alexandre (father)
Ehnni, Slimane (husband) - Short biography
- Isabelle Eberhardt was born in Geneva, Switzerland to an aristocratic Baltic German mother, Nathalie Eberhardt de Moerder, and a Russian father, Alexandre Trophimowsky, a tutor and anarchist. The family lived a reclusive life in a villa on the outskirts of the city. Isabelle was educated at home by her father and became fluent in French, Russian, German, and Italian; she also learned Latin, Greek, and Arabic. She often dressed in male attire and was free to pursue boyish activities. In 1895, as a teenager, she published her first short story under a male pseudonym. She developed a great interest in North Africa, and moved with her mother to Algeria in 1897. There she dressed as a man, eventually adopting the name Si Mahmoud Saadi. In this guise, she traveled widely on horseback in the Maghreb (northwestern Africa) and visited places that were otherwise forbidden to women. Her unconventional behavior made her an outcast among European settlers in Algeria and the French administration, which considered her to be a spy or an agitator. In 1901, the French administration ordered her to leave the country, but she was allowed to return to Algeria the following year after marrying Slimane Ehnni, a soldier. Following her return, Isabelle wrote articles for newspapers and magazines, including a French-language Algerian paper of Victor Barrucand. She moved to Aïn Séfra, where in 1904, at the age of 27, she was killed by a flash flood.
In 1906, Barrucand began publishing her remaining manuscripts, which received critical acclaim. Her life has been the subject of several works, including the 1991 film Isabelle Eberhardt. - Cause of death
- drowning (in flash flood)
- Nationality
- Switzerland
- Birthplace
- Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland
- Places of residence
- Geneva, Switzerland
Marseille, France
Annaba, Algeria
El Oued, Algeria
Aïn Sefra, Algeria - Place of death
- Aïn Séfra, French Algeria
- Burial location
- Muslim cemetery of Sidi Boudjemâa, west of Aïn Séfra, Algeria
Members
Reviews
Je dépensais follement ma jeunesse et ma force vitale, sans le moindre regret.
(I spent my youth and my vital force in a frenzy, without the least regret.)
Isabelle Eberhardt's life was a biographer's dream: wild, unconventional, romantic – and short. Born to a Russian family in Geneva in 1877, she seemed from the very beginning to be unsatisfied with almost every aspect of her person: nationality, name, religion and gender, all would be reinvented. Early stories and letters were signed show more ‘Nicolas Podolinsky’, ‘Mahmoud Saadi’, or a variety of other pseudonyms, most of them male.
North Africa was her obsession from a young age. She first moved there when she was twenty, quickly picking up the local Arabic and converting to Islam; dressed as a man, she would spend nights exploring the docks, the brothels, the less salubrious parts of the medina. As she says in one of these semi-autobiographical sketches:
Je connaissais un nombre infini d'individus tarés et louches, de filles et de repris de justice qui étaient pour moi autant de sujets d'observation et d'analyse psychologique. J'avais aussi plusieurs amis sûrs qui m'avaient initiée aux mystères de l'Alger voluptueuse et criminelle.
[I knew an infinite number of girls, ex-cons and cracked, dubious characters who for me were so many subjects of observation and psychological analysis. I also had many trusted friends who had initiated me into the mysteries of Algiers's voluptuous and criminal side.]
She uses grammatically feminine forms to refer to herself there (qui m'avaient initiée), although in her own diaries she usually writes in the masculine, French being a language unlike English where one's gender has always to be reflected in everything one says. Most of the stories in this collection have a male protagonist, and it's clear that these restless, doomed alter-egos are Eberhardt's most faithful projections of herself: lonely but wise.
La tête appuyée sur son bras replié, les membres las, il s'abandonnait à la douceur infinie de s'endormir seul, inconnu parmi les hommes simples et rudes, à même la terre, la bonne terre berceuse, en un coin de désert qui n'avait pas de nom et où il ne reviendrait jamais.
[Head pressed against his folded arm, limbs heavy, he gave himself up to the infinite sweetness of sleeping alone, unknown among simple, rustic men, against the ground – the good, soothing ground – in a corner of the desert which had no name and which he would never see again.]
If I had read these stories when I was eighteen or nineteen, when I was living in Morocco and in the throes of my own melancholy North African ecstasy, then I think this could easily have become one of my bibles; even now, a lot of the passages here give me this great heaving of nostalgia and love. Her affinity with ‘le dédale silencieux des rues arabes’, her visceral reaction to the Arabic of the call to prayer heard at dusk, her attempt to reconcile the sadness and the beauty, the tristesse and the douceur, of Algeria – all these things are captured with a frenzied clarity. Her descriptions of the Maghreb shift between reportage and proto-Orientalist awe, everything intensely felt.
La vie musulmane est ainsi faite, toute de discrétion, de mystère, de respect des vielles coutumes, et surtout de soumission patriarcale.
[That's what Muslim life is composed of – all discretion, mystery, respect for old customs, and, above all, patriarchal submission.]
Interestingly, when Eberhardt herself fell in love – with a poor Algerian soldier – she was perfectly happy to drop the male disguise for good and live in a more or less conventional couple (as often as she and her partner were able to). Somehow, in those days before identity politics, though it was a rarer thing to dress as the opposite sex, in some ways it was also less of a big deal: she could drop it at a moment's notice without feeling any conflict or any need to explain herself. It didn't ‘mean’ something in the same way that it does now (you can see why Eberhardt has been rediscovered by modern scholars).
They married in Marseille when she was twenty-four. Just three years later an overnight flash-flood knocked through the building they were staying in; he survived, but Isabelle was killed. Very few of her writings had yet been published. Fortunately, her editor at one of the newspapers, Victor Barrucand, took it upon himself to gather up and organise her papers, leading to several posthumous editions of poems, stories and journals.
What would have become of this talent if it had been allowed to mature is difficult to imagine; as it is, her writing blows through you like a sirocco of youthful wonder and wanderlust from someone who, to the extent that she had yet understood any of the world's conventions, had no intention of following a single one of them. show less
(I spent my youth and my vital force in a frenzy, without the least regret.)
Isabelle Eberhardt's life was a biographer's dream: wild, unconventional, romantic – and short. Born to a Russian family in Geneva in 1877, she seemed from the very beginning to be unsatisfied with almost every aspect of her person: nationality, name, religion and gender, all would be reinvented. Early stories and letters were signed show more ‘Nicolas Podolinsky’, ‘Mahmoud Saadi’, or a variety of other pseudonyms, most of them male.
North Africa was her obsession from a young age. She first moved there when she was twenty, quickly picking up the local Arabic and converting to Islam; dressed as a man, she would spend nights exploring the docks, the brothels, the less salubrious parts of the medina. As she says in one of these semi-autobiographical sketches:
Je connaissais un nombre infini d'individus tarés et louches, de filles et de repris de justice qui étaient pour moi autant de sujets d'observation et d'analyse psychologique. J'avais aussi plusieurs amis sûrs qui m'avaient initiée aux mystères de l'Alger voluptueuse et criminelle.
[I knew an infinite number of girls, ex-cons and cracked, dubious characters who for me were so many subjects of observation and psychological analysis. I also had many trusted friends who had initiated me into the mysteries of Algiers's voluptuous and criminal side.]
She uses grammatically feminine forms to refer to herself there (qui m'avaient initiée), although in her own diaries she usually writes in the masculine, French being a language unlike English where one's gender has always to be reflected in everything one says. Most of the stories in this collection have a male protagonist, and it's clear that these restless, doomed alter-egos are Eberhardt's most faithful projections of herself: lonely but wise.
La tête appuyée sur son bras replié, les membres las, il s'abandonnait à la douceur infinie de s'endormir seul, inconnu parmi les hommes simples et rudes, à même la terre, la bonne terre berceuse, en un coin de désert qui n'avait pas de nom et où il ne reviendrait jamais.
[Head pressed against his folded arm, limbs heavy, he gave himself up to the infinite sweetness of sleeping alone, unknown among simple, rustic men, against the ground – the good, soothing ground – in a corner of the desert which had no name and which he would never see again.]
If I had read these stories when I was eighteen or nineteen, when I was living in Morocco and in the throes of my own melancholy North African ecstasy, then I think this could easily have become one of my bibles; even now, a lot of the passages here give me this great heaving of nostalgia and love. Her affinity with ‘le dédale silencieux des rues arabes’, her visceral reaction to the Arabic of the call to prayer heard at dusk, her attempt to reconcile the sadness and the beauty, the tristesse and the douceur, of Algeria – all these things are captured with a frenzied clarity. Her descriptions of the Maghreb shift between reportage and proto-Orientalist awe, everything intensely felt.
La vie musulmane est ainsi faite, toute de discrétion, de mystère, de respect des vielles coutumes, et surtout de soumission patriarcale.
[That's what Muslim life is composed of – all discretion, mystery, respect for old customs, and, above all, patriarchal submission.]
Interestingly, when Eberhardt herself fell in love – with a poor Algerian soldier – she was perfectly happy to drop the male disguise for good and live in a more or less conventional couple (as often as she and her partner were able to). Somehow, in those days before identity politics, though it was a rarer thing to dress as the opposite sex, in some ways it was also less of a big deal: she could drop it at a moment's notice without feeling any conflict or any need to explain herself. It didn't ‘mean’ something in the same way that it does now (you can see why Eberhardt has been rediscovered by modern scholars).
They married in Marseille when she was twenty-four. Just three years later an overnight flash-flood knocked through the building they were staying in; he survived, but Isabelle was killed. Very few of her writings had yet been published. Fortunately, her editor at one of the newspapers, Victor Barrucand, took it upon himself to gather up and organise her papers, leading to several posthumous editions of poems, stories and journals.
What would have become of this talent if it had been allowed to mature is difficult to imagine; as it is, her writing blows through you like a sirocco of youthful wonder and wanderlust from someone who, to the extent that she had yet understood any of the world's conventions, had no intention of following a single one of them. show less
Paul Bowles wrote the introduction to this collection of stories by Isabelle Eberhardt, a kif-smoking ex-pat Sufi who drowned (1904) in a flash flood in Aïn Séfra, Algeria. Eberhardt’s stories are peopled by lovers, soldiers and vagabonds, always seeming to be turning oh so slowly toward their destiny, along dusty dry roads under wide bright skies through a land of ramshackle tradition. It so happens that while reading these stories I came across a collection of old 78s on CD called The show more Secret Museum of Mankind: North African Classics, 1925-1948, and the woozy feel of keening double-reed zurna over undulating rhythms and the melodies of plucked kwitra like pebbles falling through gnarled fingers onto a field of muffled bells stuck to these stories like honeyed makroudh. show less
I love quirky, and the back-story of this author is about as quirky as you could get.
The author is a young Swiss, born in 1877. She grew up in an unconventional family environment (her father was an ex-Orthodox priest turned atheist), was home schooled and took to wearing boys clothes as a matter of course. She travelled widely in colonial Algeria, often, apparently, gaining access to some places and events by her old habit of cross-dressing. She died so very prematurely, in a flood at show more 27.
Her writing is vivid and tells of life in an exotic and lost world. She was largely spurned by the French colonists, but lived an extraordinary life for the times.
Amazing. show less
The author is a young Swiss, born in 1877. She grew up in an unconventional family environment (her father was an ex-Orthodox priest turned atheist), was home schooled and took to wearing boys clothes as a matter of course. She travelled widely in colonial Algeria, often, apparently, gaining access to some places and events by her old habit of cross-dressing. She died so very prematurely, in a flood at show more 27.
Her writing is vivid and tells of life in an exotic and lost world. She was largely spurned by the French colonists, but lived an extraordinary life for the times.
Amazing. show less
Isabelle Eberhardt was born in Geneva, Switzerland in 1877. She was the illegitimate daughter of a Swiss aristocrat. For most of her life she dressed as a boy/ young man because it gave her more freedom. In 1897 she and her mother traveled to North Africa and converted to Islam. After the deaths of everyone in her family (except a married brother) she lived in North Africa, posing as a young, male Tunisian student from 1899 onward. She earned a living writing books and articles for French show more newspapers. This books chronicles her travels in the Sahara, mostly in Morocco and Algeria, in 1904. Her writing is very descriptive - about the people, the places, the rooms, religion and esp, the desert. She seems to have loved describing the play of light, at various times of day, on the desert sands. I was surprised by her many prejudices. I expected someone who sought out such a life to be more open minded. Her disdain for women, Jews and blacks is scattered throughout the text. Eberhardt died in a flash flood in October 1904. She was 27 years old. These essays were found in a vase inside the ruins of the collapsed house.
Recommended for those interested in travel, Islam, Sufism. show less
Recommended for those interested in travel, Islam, Sufism. show less
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- Works
- 47
- Also by
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- Members
- 679
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- #37,220
- Rating
- 3.9
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- 19
- ISBNs
- 76
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