Rewriting the Legacy of Isabelle Eberhardt in North Africa

Bennett, Kirsty and Baker, Charlotte and Braun, Rebecca (2024) Rewriting the Legacy of Isabelle Eberhardt in North Africa. PhD thesis, Lancaster University.

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Abstract

This thesis examines and rewrites the legacy of the Russian/French writer Isabelle Eberhardt (1878-1904) who was born in Geneva but lived in Algeria, her adopted country, from 1899 until her untimely death in a flash flood in the desert of Aïn Séfra in 1904. She undertook the male pseudonym of Mahmoud Saâdi, married an Algerian spahi, Sliman Ehnni, in 1901, but published in French under the name Isabelle Eberhardt and earlier under her Russian male pseudonym of Nicolas Podolinsky. I contest her legacy in Francophone, Anglophone and Arabophone contexts where she is commonly, and problematically, categorised in popular culture as an eccentric woman travel writer and lauded as an icon of feminism. I argue for her status as an intellectual and an important writer of an overlooked period of Algerian history and a devoted convert to Islam as an initiate of the Qadiriyya Sufi brotherhood, as opposed to a dilettante pursuing a form of Islam more ‘accessible’ to Europeans. Whilst Eberhardt tends to engender opposing views in academia across North Africa and Europe - was she a ‘champion of decolonisation’ or did she ‘serve the designs of colonialism’? 1 - I seek rather to understand her multiplicity of stances through some representative key events in Algerian and Moroccan colonial history from 1902-1904 using both historical and literary sources. Finally, I examine how these events are inflected in her literary afterlives in Europe and Algeria, where Eberhardt serves different interests and ideological positions, which as this thesis demonstrates, do neither her work nor her life justice.