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 ‘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. ( )