The Oblivion Seekers

2009 | Biography

A cult classic of travel writing from Isabelle Eberhardt whose life was one of the most extraordinary of any writer’s of the last 150 years.

Daughter of a Russian Nihilist who forbade her any contact with society, dressed her as a man and insisted her education consisted of hard physical labour, she, perhaps unsurprisingly, ran away to North Africa in 1897, aged twenty. There she travelled through the Sahara and became one of the few Western women ever to have been initiated into Sufi Islam. She also produced a small but exceptional body of writing.

The Oblivion Seekers is a selection of her best stories and vignettes of African life, including several excerpts from the unfinished work her biographer Cecily Mackworth called 'one of the strangest documents that a woman has given to the world'.

Isabelle Eberhardt (Author)