Twenty-Ninth Issue: Isabelle Eberhardt

Hello! I hope you had a good new year and holiday season! I can’t believe it’s been a year since I’ve been writing this newsletter. I’m thankful that all of you care enough to read it!

Today I’m going to talk about another historical lesbian.

Isabelle Eberhardt was born in Switzerland in the late 1800s. Her father was, according to Wikipedia, “an anarchist, tutor, and former Orthodox priest turned atheist”, and her mother was the “illegitimate daughter of a middle-class Lutheran German and a Russian aristocratic Jew”. Her mother had actually left her first husband for Isabelle’s father who she had hired as a tutor for her two eldest sons. Isabelle’s father abandoned his own family and the two moved away to Switzerland to start a new life.

Isabelle was home-schooled by her father, as were her siblings. She spoke French, Russian, German, Italian, Latin, Greek, and Arabic. She read the Koran and also studied philosophy, metaphysics, chemistry, history, geography, and literature. She started wearing boys’ clothes as a teen and her father didn’t discourage her. Her stepbrothers resented Isabelle’s father, and Isabelle’s mother left her father with her eldest sons when Isabelle was a girl.

 

 

Isabelle published her first written work under a pseudonym, it was a short story about a “medical student’s physical attraction to a dead woman”. She exchange letters with several French people who lived in the Sahara. She published a story  called “Vision of the Maghreb” about North Africa, with anti-colonial themes. This story attracted the attention of an Algerian-French photographer named Louis David who invited her and her mother to visit him in Algeria.

Isabelle and her mother moved in with Louis and his wife, who disapproved of how much time the two ladies spent with the local Arabs. After a while, they rented an Arab-style house far away from where the other Europeans lived. Isabelle dressed as a man in typical Arab clothing since she knew that Muslim women couldn’t go out alone and unveiled. The French and colonial administration thought she was weird and kept an eye on her. Both Isabelle and her mother converted to Islam, and Isabelle kept writing and publishing short stories. Isabelle’s mother died two years later and was buried under the name Fatma Mannoubia.

Even though Isabelle was now a Muslim, she had many lovers, drank alcohol, and smoked pot. Some historians wondered why she was tolerated by the conservative culture at the time and one biographer said that it was as simple as the fact that Isabelle wished to live as a man and therefore she was treated as one.

 

 

Isabelle’s elder brothers either died or went back to Russia. Her father died in 1899 and Isabelle mortgaged the villa they had lived in and returned back to Africa. She changed her name to Si Mahmoud Saadi and basically became a man. I will continue to use she/her pronouns for her as there is no way of knowing if she was transgender or just lived as a man due to the restrictions of being female in society at the time, or some combination of both.

She ran out of money eventually and went to Paris. She met the widow of the Marquis de Morès who had been murdered in the Sahara. She hired Isabelle to investigate his murder. Isabelle returned to Algeria in 1900, and didn’t bother to investigate much, mainly because the French administration there didn’t really want to cooperate.

Isabelle met an Algerian soldier there named Slimane Ehnni. They fell in love and lived together, further pissing off the French authorities. She then met the Qadiriyya, a sufi order, where she was initiated into the order without the usual examination since she already had a knowledge and passion for Islam. The French authorities thought that this meant she was a spy of some kind and put her on a blacklist. They then transferred Slimane to another town and Isabelle was too poor to follow him. She asked the Qadiriyya for money but while she was there a man with a sabre attacked her. She was not killed because others at the meeting were able to overpower him. She did suffer from arm and shoulder injuries, and went to the hospital where she recovered. She suspected the French authorities had sent the assassin. The Qadiriyya gave her money to join Slimane because they thought her survival was a miracle.

Isabelle and Slimane were together only briefly and the French ordered her to leave the country. Slimane asked if he could marry Isabelle so she could stay but they said no. She went to France in 1901 but was asked back to testify at her attacker’s trial. He got life imprisonment. Isabelle went back to France and lived with her brother Augustin and his family, working with him as a laborer on the docks, disguised as a man, while also completing her novel. Soon Slimane was transferred to Marseille and there he married Isabelle in France and the two of them moved to Algeria again once he was discharged, to live with his family.

Isabelle took a job in Algiers with a newspaper publisher in 1902, and by the next year her stories had been published and her novel began appearing as a serial. Isabelle reported on the Battle of El-Moungar and stayed with French Foreign Legion soldiers. She met an officer named Hubert Lyautey and became a liaison between him and the local people due to her knowledge of the religion, language and culture. She may have also acted as his spy.

 

 

As she grew older, Isabelle began to lose teeth and probably suffered from syphilis. She was only 27, but her adventures were taking a toll. She was treated at the military hospital but wasn’t doing well. She called her husband and the two of them rented a small house in 1904 where Isabelle was killed by a flash flood. She was buried nearby with a tombstone with her names in Arabic and also in French.

Isabelle’s works were published posthumously, and were lauded critically. Her work was seen as an advocate of decolonization in North Africa. However, the fact that she spied for Lyautey later in life puts some of this in question. You will have to make your own judgment on this.