A Subversive Imperialist: Reappraising Freya Stark (Critical Essay‪)‬

In reconsidering the work of the writer and traveler Freya Stark, who died in 1993 aged 101, her godson--the author--argues that her human and artistic instincts ran in the opposite direction to the belief in British imperialism she espoused at a formal level. Possessing a literary sensibility informed by Jane Austen and other classical novelists, she maintained a deep-rooted conviction in the natural goodness of the ordinary people whose lives she shared more intimately than other travelers. The fact that her sympathetic human insights were ultimately incompatible with her benign vision of empire does not diminish her achievement. **********