Background
Rosita Forbes was born on January 16, 1890, in Swinderly, Lincolnshire; the daughter of Herbert James, a landowner and a member of Parliament, and Rosita (Graham) Torr.
1923
Rosita Forbes in Middle Eastern dress.
1937
Rosita Forbes is about to take a party of well-known men and fashionable women to India to teach them to shoot tigers.
1940
Rosita Forbes looking at an architectural drawing at her home in Great Cumberland Place, where she lives with her husband Arthur McGrath, London.
1940
Rosita Forbes reading a manuscript at her home in Great Cumberland Place, where she lives with her husband Arthur McGrath, London.
Rosita Forbes dressed as an Arab woman.
Rosita Forbes, architect Robert Lutyens and draughtsman Mr McDonald working on plans for the decoration of Forbes' home at Great Cumberland Place, London.
Rosita Forbes in the costume she favours most during adventurous travels.
Rosita Forbes in Muslim dress. From Heroes of Modern Adventure, published in 1927.
Mulai Ahmed er Raisuni and Rosita Forbes in Morocco.
Rosita Forbes was born on January 16, 1890, in Swinderly, Lincolnshire; the daughter of Herbert James, a landowner and a member of Parliament, and Rosita (Graham) Torr.
Forbes began her education under the tutelage of a governess at home but continued it at a school in London. She developed an early interest in maps, reading, and horses, and demonstrated a facility for learning foreign languages quickly. While still a young girl, she had an article on birdlife accepted for publication but burned a novel she had written, according to the Feminist Companion to Literature in English. These interests and talents would later come into prominent use during her extensive worldwide travels.
In her first book, Unconducted Wanderers, published in 1919, Forbes recounts the details of an around-the-world journey she took with a friend who had recently been discharged from the hospital. Heedless of possible dangers from German U-boats and other military sources, Forbes and her friend set sail from England on an Atlantic liner, Rogal wrote. The pair landed in New York, crossed the United States to California, and visited such locations as Hawaii, Samoa, New Guinea, Java, Malaysia, Thailand, Cambodia, China, Korea, and North Africa, among many others. Forbes first encountered the Arab world during her time in North Africa, and visits to Cairo, Damascus, and Beirut aroused an interest in that part of the world that lasted for a lifetime.
Unconducted Wanderers was a well-received book, and it helped to establish Forbes’s popularity as a writer. Rosita cultivated a fascination with the cultures and customs of the places she visited, and her detailed coverage of these areas added to her popularity as a travel writer.
In the winter of 1920-1921, Forbes crossed the Libyan Desert to the oasis at Kufara (Al-Kufrah) and the sacred city of Taj, a journey “which established Forbes’s legitimacy as a serious world traveler.” Kufara was beyond the borders of Italian occupation in the area, and the last European expedition to make it that far had taken place in 1879. Maps from that expedition had been lost during a Bedouin raid, making travel in the area haphazard at best and lethally dangerous at worst.
To make travel easier for her, Forbes adopted the identity of a Muslim, “Sitt Khadija,” in order to facilitate her ability to move about freely and to converse with all manner of natives. Forbes was accompanied by Egyptian scholar and explorer Hassanein Bey. She carried with her a passport and papers from Muhammad Idris, the ruler of the area.
Forbes wrote about her desert expedition in The Secret of the Sahara: Kufara, published in 1921. The book included an introduction by noted explorer Sir Harry Hamilton Johnston, one of many well-known contemporaries who contributed prefaces and introductions for Forbes’s books.
After The Secret of the Sahara: Kufara, Forbes turned her attention to fiction-writing, quickly producing three novels: The Jewel in the Lotus in 1922, Quest: The Story of Anne, Three Men, and Some Arabs in 1922, and A Fool's Hell in 1923. The novels draw heavily on Forbes’s travels to provide convincing and detailed background.
Forbes’s 1924 book, El Raisuli, the Sultan of the Mountains: His Life Story, struck a reasonable balance of biography, adventure, narrative, and travel writing. Through a series of face-to-face interviews, Forbes constructed a chronicle of the life of Ahmad ibn Mohammad Raisuli, a Moroccan bandit and kidnapper whose activities were part of popular culture from 1900 to 1905.
Following the Raisuli biography, Forbes spent the winter of 1923-1924 on a lecture tour of the United States, giving eighty-eight lectures in ninety-one days. She characterized the experience as “enormously interesting and far more exhausting than any amount of desert travel.” Her lectures, based on fact and her direct observations, had to compete with the romantic images and notions in the 1921 Rudolph Valentino movie The Sheik. In the United States, Forbes was given a mixed reaction from the press. Some had difficulty believing that she had seen and done all she claimed. Some editors refused to publish her articles on Palestine because they considered Forbes’s prose too florid and unintelligible for American tastes.
In 1925, Forbes traveled to Ethiopia, accompanied by motion picture photographer Harold Jones. From the journey, Jones got a movie, and Forbes got her next book, From Red Sea to Blue Nile: Abyssinian Adventures, published in 1925. The book included sixty-one of Forbes’s photographs, plus extremely detailed accounts of the elements of the trip, including travel dates and times, miles covered, and happenings for any given day. Forbes and Jones trekked across approximately 1100 miles of varied terrain in three months. Forbes’s narrative also served as the textual bridges for Jones’s silent film.
From 1925 to 1930, Forbes devoted the major portion of her time to writing mediocre fiction, producing works such as Sirocco in 1927 (written with Forbes’s friend Noel Coward); Account Rendered, and King’s Mate in 1928, and The Cavaliers of Death in 1930. Again, Forbes relied on her own experiences and observations to provide rich backgrounds for her fiction.
Forbes next provided a combination of travel literature and biography in her book, Adventure, Being a Gipsy Salad—Some Incidents, Excitements, and Impressions of Twelve Highly Seasoned Years, published in 1928. She opens the book with two chapters that describe her background and reasons for becoming a traveler and writer, including her early interest in maps.
Another aspect of Adventure is Forbes’s head-on challenge to the stereotypical images of women held in the 1920s when she asks in one of her chapters whether men or women are the braver. Forbes concluded that bravery exists everywhere, in both men and women, “but perhaps the balance is in favour of women,” she wrote, “for they have to put up the hardest fight against nerves, health, and circumstance; in fact, against the centuries-old heritage of Eve.” Forbes was able to anticipate her readers’ reactions to her experiences within the context of their stereotypical images of and notions about women.
Forbes described her extensive 1930-1931 journeys through Turkey, Syria, Palestine, Iraq, and Persia (now Iran) in her 1931 book Conflict: Angora to Afghanistan. In it, she writes of the struggles and contrasts pre-dominating in the area: between medievalism and industrialization, feudalism and socialism, ancient religions and the new Soviet idealism, the Koran and the Talmud, and superstition and science. But the real value of the book lies in her extensive, intelligent, clearly written commentary on the social, economic, and political conditions of those countries through which she traveled.
In 1931, Forbes published another novel, Ordinary People. Afterward, she and her husband visited South America, a journey she wrote about in 1933’s Eight Republics in Search of a Future: Evolution and Revolution in South America. She covers conditions in Brazil, Argentina, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Uruguay, Paraguay, and Chile, with a greater focus on Brazil, Argentina, and Chile. Forbes’s usual detailed travel narratives were enhanced by her discussions of South American politics and economics. Forbes also included a great deal of pure statistical data in the book, which bolstered its journalistic integrity.
Another novel followed in 1934, The Extraordinary House, a mystery that made use of Forbes’s South American travels. An updated version of From Red Sea to Blue Nile followed, with additional information and commentary by Forbes, and an introduction by Edmund Henry Hynman, first Viscount Allenby and a field marshal in the Middle East during World War I, who described current conditions in Ethiopia.
In 1935, Forbes published what was to become one of her most controversial books. In Women Called Wild, Forbes paraded before her readers a collection of half-civilized women from remote sections of the world. In evocative, detailed essays, Forbes described native women such as females in Arabian slave markets, troglodyte women of Tripolitania (now part of Libya) that lived in caves, revolutionary women in Russia and China, witches in Java and women of the “people of the flame” of Dutch Guiana (now Suriname), who had a resistance to fire.
However, Forbes did not write Women Called Wild simply to frighten or entertain her readers. As with all of her travel writings, she sought to enlighten those unfamiliar with remote sections of the globe. Critical reaction to Women Called Wild tended toward the negative. Many critics simply found Forbes’s accounts unbelievable, especially in light of her many published works of fiction. Despite some critical naysayers, the book remained popular with her readers. In 1936, Forbes published The Golden Vagabond, her last novel.
Forbidden Road—Kabul to Samarkand, published in 1937, contained the chronicle of Forbes’s journey through Russian territories. Forbes provided detailed, leisurely accounts of her trip, and reaffirmed her passionate interest in meeting the people of the regions through which she journeyed. Also in 1937, Forbes published These Are Real People. The book contained profiles of colorful individuals Forbes had met during her travels, including a French man “who committed murder because he despised everything that he considered ugly,” and the “Zebra Man,” who was one of the few who managed a successful escape from Devil’s Island, the notorious penal colony off the coast of French Guiana.
During the years of World War II, Forbes lectured extensively throughout the United States, Canada, and Great Britain. She and her husband also began spending more time and energy in the Bahamas, building an estate called Unicorn Cay in 1939 and 1940 on 400 acres of the island of Eleuthera. In 1939, Forbes’s A Unicorn in the Bahamas was published, wherein she wrote extensively about the Bahama Islands of New Providence, Cat Island, Bimini, San Salvador, Andros, and more. The book served its purpose of getting readers interested in the Bahamas and providing potential travelers with useful, detailed information on the area.
Another of Forbes’s travel narratives, India of the Princes, also appeared in 1939. Like other of her books, it combined description and travel, personal narrative, historical fact, and contemporary opinion. Contents included histories of the states, biographical information on the rulers, descriptions of palaces, commentary on various rulers’ wealth, and other descriptions of royal life in India.
Forbes’s next book, These Men I Knew, appeared in 1950. It included biographical information and her impressions of more than two dozen men (and one woman) whom she has met or interviewed. Many of her subjects became key figures during World War II, including Adolph Hitler, Herman Goering, Joseph Goebbels, Joseph Stalin, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Benito Mussolini. She also knew and interviewed historical figures such as Mohandas Gandhi, Haile Selassie, Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands, Kemal Ataturk of Turkey, and Henry Ford.
Among Forbes’s last works were two volumes of autobiography, Gypsy in the Sun, published in 1944, and Appointment with Destiny, published in 1946.
(The autobiography of Rosita Forbes, one of the most obser...)
1946(Biography for junior readers of Henry Morgan, 17th centur...)
(Bio of Sir Henry Morgan.)
1948
Quotations:
"It is true there is a scent in the desert, though there may be no flower or tree or blade of grass within miles. It is the essence of the untrodden, untarnished earth herself!"
"The desert has a subtle and a cruel charm. She destroys while she enthralls."
"The curly red lines across the African deserts had the fascination of a magnet, and I hoped fervently that the pioneers who were writing their names over the blank spaces, would leave just one small desert for me."
"That is the charm of the map. It represents the other side of the horizon where everything is possible."
Joan Rosita Torr married Col. Robert Foster Forbes in 1911. They divorced in 1917. She was married again in 1921, to Col. Arthur Thomas McGrath. In 1962 she was widowed.